Any Tips for Reviving Old Websites?
-
Hi,
I have a series of websites that have been offline for seven years. Do you guys have any tips that might help restore them to their former SERPs glory?
Nothing about the sites themselves has changes since they went offline. Same domains, same content, and only a different server. What has changed is the SERPs landscape. I've noticed competitive terms that these sites used to rank on the first page for with far more results now. I have also noticed some terms result in what seems like a thesaurus similar language results from traditionally more authoritative websites instead of the exact phrase searched for. This concerns me because I could see a less relevant page outranking me just because it is on a .gov domain with similar vocabulary even though the result is not what people searching for the term are most likely searching for.
The sites have also lost numerous backlinks but still have some really good ones.
-
Content Refresh: Update outdated content, add new information, and improve formatting to make it more engaging and relevant to current trends.
SEO Audit: Conduct a thorough SEO audit to identify and fix issues such as broken links, outdated keywords, and poor site structure.
Mobile Optimization: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as more users are accessing the internet through mobile devices.
Speed Optimization: Improve page loading speed by optimizing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, and using caching techniques.
Backlink Analysis: Review and disavow low-quality or spammy backlinks while seeking opportunities to acquire high-quality backlinks from reputable sources.
User Experience Enhancement: Enhance user experience by improving navigation, implementing clear calls-to-action, and optimizing for readability.
Social Media Integration: Promote your website through social media channels to increase visibility and attract more traffic.
Update Design: Modernize the website design to reflect current design trends and improve overall aesthetics.
Regular Updates: Commit to regularly updating the website with fresh content, news, or blog posts to keep visitors engaged and encourage return visits.
Analytics Monitoring: Use website analytics tools to monitor traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates, and make data-driven decisions to optimize performance.
By implementing these strategies, you can breathe new life into your old website and improve its visibility, usability, and overall effectiveness.
-
Improving the Organic SEO for on an old company website, is the same SEO, as you would apply to a brand new company website; that is white hat seo.
you do need high-quality content marketing and good-quality backlinks. We own a summerhouse company, and this is how we got the business on the first page of Google.
-
If you are reviving an old website make sure it is mobile friendly. Then you will need to refresh the content and update page titles and meta descriptions. Also make sure you add new content regularly.
-
That's a good question and I'd agree - I imagine that references to your website in published books online could be treated similarly to mentions across the web. Whether Google gives it any extra weight or not is unclear, but I'd agree that the implication is that a mention in a published book could carry some weight.
-
Thank you for the replies. They give me more hope because I was thinking along similar lines.
I certainly plan on reaching out to the authors of old articles that lost link, but I am not so sure sometimes. One of the old websites specifically got its coverage from being controversial so I am not sure if they unlinked due to it being down or due to complaints from people pointing out how they were helping it by linking to it. I have been noticing articles like https://moz.com/learn/seo/backlinks and I would hate to risk losing mentions on high quality sites by drawing attention to new editors that might just delete the articles entirely.
Another question I have related to mentions is mentions in books. I have noticed a site of mine showing up in Google Books from a couple of published books discussing it. Does that help SEO like a brand mention on a high quality site?
I would think that Google would consider sites mentioned in published books to be more authoritative than ones just mentioned in blogs or news stories.
-
Hi there,
I'd suggest a few things:
1. If you have old analytics data or log file data to show you which content performed best when the site was last live, take a look at that and prioritise restoring and updating the content which worked well previously.
2. Go through the content and update with fresh information, data, images, links etc to give everything a freshen up. Don't worry if content is still relevant and evergreen, but just do some checks to make sure.
3. Once you've updated the content and you're happy with it, generate some new XML sitemaps and submit to Google Search Console to prompt Google to crawl the pages again and get them into the index.
4. In addition, perhaps submit the homepage and a few key pages to Google Search Console for crawling and indexing.
5. Once the pages are indexed, keep an eye on Search Console to see how pages are performing and use this data to update the most popular pages.
6. In terms of links, if you can restore any valuable lost ones by reaching back out to the websites, letting them know that the site has relaunched and seeing if they can restore the links, that may give it a nudge too.
I hope that helps!
Paddy
-
Hi,
As previously stated by seotoolshelp5 with addition of
1. Check for any issues with dead links leading to this websites
2. Check crawling errors
3. check website speed and improve it if necessary
4. Prioritize mobile version (if you don't have one, create it)
That's all for now what I can think of.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google blocks certain articles on my website ... !
Hello I have a website with more than 350 unique articles, Most of them are crawled by Google without a problem, but I find out certain articles are never indexed by Google. I tried to rewrite them, adding fresh images and optimizing them but it gets me nowhere. Lately, I rewrite an article of those and tried to (fetch and render) through Google Webmasters, and I found this result, can you tell me if there is anything to do to fix that? BMVh4
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evcindex0 -
SEO transfer to new website
My website currently has some strong SEO and i will be re-developing the website on a wordpress platform...which will change many of the existing URL. Will this affect the current pages that are well indexed in Google? Does using Wordpress or changing the URL extension (.html to .php) make a difference? If i want to make a clean transition without effecting our existing SEO...what are some essential steps i need to take? Example. Current page is www.mydomain.com/name.html .... and the new URL would be www.mydomain.com/product/name.php Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Souk0 -
Bing seriously hitting our website
Hi I have a strange query, Bing in the last four weeks have been seriously crawling our site, and while at the moment this isn't affecting our servers, coming into the busy time of the year I am just wondering if anyone else is seeing this. They are basically crawling the entire site (including nofollow pages) even though according to Bing Webmaster tools, they know our sitemap. Is anybody else seeing any unusual activity with the Bing bot. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
FIFA 15 Tips
Howdy Mozzers, Trying to be proactive for a keyword that is going to be popular in the future. The keyword is "FIFA 15 tips" and the page is http://orangeoctop.us/fifa15-tips/. I have tried to model the page after Moz's category pages. Since the game has not yet been released it is difficult to have tips for the game. When the FIFA 15 game does come out, we will have tips coming in from the best gamers in the world (thought leaders), however there will be so much other media attention that we will get pushed even further down. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Looking for some outside of the box ideas for FIFA 15 tips.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | orangeoctop.us0 -
XML Sitemaps - Multi-lingual website
Hi Mozzers, I am working with a large website that has some of its content translated across multiple languages. I am planning on using The Media Flow to create an HREFLANG Sitemap for content on various languages. Please see the attached image for the questions below. Thanks! Section Highlighted Yellow: When there is a URL that does not have a translated version, should it not be included on the same HREFLANG sitemap? Alternately, could I just remove the languages that are not being targeted, so this would just reflect English language targeting? fqO9Dvk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J-Banz0 -
Tips for Getting into Bing News?
For anyone that has gone through the process of getting accepted into Bing news---do you have any suggestions for what we can do? Any resources you'd recommend reading?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Looking for guidance on transferring and incorporating content from a purchased website into an existing website
One of my client’s recently purchased a competitor’s website, and we would like to transfer the content from the competitor’s website (http://www.wilson-hardness.com) to our client’s existing website (http://www.buehler.com); at the same time we want to minimize loss in keyword rankings the competitor’s website has established. The two websites work in similar fields: one measures and offers products in scientific measurement and analysis of various materials. The other website offers products that are in similar field: hardness testing equipment. Looking for suggestions on how to proceed or recommended reading on the topic. I’ve tried to do research, but haven’t found anything, so I’m not sure what to topic-names to search. Any guidance would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Have I missed anthing On this website?
Hello SEO MOzzers, I am today wanting your feedback on a site that I recently went live with. My Google rankings for the main keywords are doing very well considering the site has been live for 3 weeks now. I of course have a list of items that i'm still working on, completing meta description tags, title tags, adding copy content to category pages, updating h1 tags, working on our backlinking campaign, etc. Is there anthing any of you SEO Mozzers can see that I may have missed? the web domain is www.carbodypanels4u.co.uk Keywords "body Panels"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seohive-222720
"car body panels"
"Car Make body panels"
"Car make Model body panel" Im sure you get the gist of the keyword structure. Your feedback is much appreciated as always. shiv0