It’s been awhile since my last post. Ever since the penalty imposed by the October 14, 2011 Google Panda 2.5.2 update, my website traffic has gone down, and so did my motivation for running my personal blogs and websites. The hit was rather severe causing both my authoritative guide website traffic to go down by as much 50% to 60% as well as my hobby blog such as this. I do get a kick to see my site having traffic despite not earning much. And this time it is really a kick in my stomach.

So no choice now, but to do the cleanup process in order to get my site to bounce back up again. This is no mean feat. All this while, my content creation process has been according to SBI Action Guide and some extras to get my authoritative site to rank well and to over deliver my information making my site the best it could be in order to beat the other guys. At the same time get some side income from Adsense and other affiliates. It has done pretty well until the Google Panda update, so left me in quite a shock and hanging on a thread.

There is going to be changes to both my authoritative website and this hobby blog of mine. This is going to be a grinding process taking a lawn mower and hacking up the site and tearing down pages that are pulling my site traffic down. There is going to be changes to the layout and getting rid of affiliates that is giving me squat.

My Task List

• Get rid of boiler plates – it makes Google algo thinks that each page is similar thus throwing many pages back, way back as much as minus 50 in SERP, perhaps even more.
• Get rid of thin pages – well, this blog is full of it. Especially those posts that I imported from the dead Six Apart’s Vox.com blogging site that I used way sometime back. Those were my short mobile blogs with pictures. Anyway those picture content didn’t do that great if it is missing the ALT tag. So not much point to keep them around. The only problem is there are many and deleting them would also incur 404 error pages. No choice, have to do it. That still leave me with thin pages from my other latched on services like Tumblr, Blogger and Posterous. Not sure what to do with them, but at least there is some clean up on the my main site.
• Affiliates and Ads – I’ve been testing them for a very long time, so the final verdict is out on which to keep, which to throw out.
  • In: Adsense (of course, they are still the best!), Infolinks (their account panel is better than Kontera), Chitika (slow but steady, low threshold payout at USD10 still makes them a keeper).
  • Out: Bidvertiser (almost zero income), Kontera (difference against Infolinks not much, but their poor reporting makes me drop them off), Nuffnang and Advertlets (Will just keep them for a little while longer until reaching the payout threshold, then out the window! Takes way too long to accumulate, maybe already pass 3-4 years to get this far), Amazon (will have to try another method, attaching onto blogs don’t get any sales at all!).
• Duplicate Content – well, sometimes I repost things people email to me and sort of share them out again. Google don’t like duplicate content. What’s the point having dozens of the same thing in the SERP. Adds little value to user experience according to Google. Unless I rewrote a new angle of view to it if I feel strongly about the topic, then again it would be difficult to rank well, might be better to throw them out the window.
• Recent Post List and Tags List – I did notice when I do a test search some description ended up same due to these lists. So probably have to remove them or use a JavaScript version to avoid boilerplate duplicate content description issue.
• Speed of loading – will have to cleanup useless JavaScripts and hopefully speed up the website just a little. But this is not major issue with Google Panda update, this is just for better user visitor experience with better load times.

The above by far may not be the complete list of things to do for a website cleanup, but it is already quite a lot of work to do and would definitely take up some time to do it. Hopefully after the clean up, some measure of website traffic restoration against the penalty imposed by the October 2011 Google Panda 2.5.2 update and hopefully restore my bruise ego and motivation for blogging as well too!

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