Domain Rehabilitation: recovering pagerank

As I said recently, I’m working on rehabilitating this domain. One of the problems I’ve diagnosed with it is that my pagerank is zeroed out. Well, you know how I feel about that, but they won, we lost, and people still factor visible pagerank in when deciding what a domain is worth. Which really doesn’t make sense, because the visible pagerank can have to little to do with Google’s actual attitude about sending a site traffic. This one is a good example.

Does zero pagerank mean you’re banned?

No. Blue Mushrooms is still getting traffic from Google. I even rank fairly high on some key phrases. Despite that PR0 you see, Google is doing pretty well by this domain, considering how poorly I’ve done by it – when it started, I knew almost nothing, and I experimented on it almost randomly. If I was keeping the site forever, I wouldn’t even be concerned about the PR at this point. But in actuality, the reasons why I suspect I have PR0 do highlight some genuine problems with the site that I know how to fix now.

Why is the pagerank zeroed out?

Here’s my best guess.

As far as I can tell, the site was zeroed out for mainly having paid text links, which is against Google’s webmaster guidelines.
There is the slimmest of possibilities that Google also thought my splogged articles were the dupes, instead of the other way around, but I think their algorithm is probably smarter than that (after all, both version of the articles had the dates and times, and mine were always earlier – how hard would that be for a robot to work out?).
Another possible reason for the zeroing is that over time, a lot of the bloggers who linked to me either went away or stopped linking because I wasn’t putting out new content, and all my inbounds are now super spammy directories.

Dumping paid links

I removed the Text Link Ads a long time ago, but the directory still had paid links until recently (and since it doesn’t offer unpaid ones, it would be a cinch for Google to detect those links are paid). I haven’t made any money from the directory in ages, and it gets more traffic than the blog, so I decided to kill it. But how? Should I just delete it and let all those pages go 404? Or should I 301 redirect them to something else? I really wanted to redirect that juicy traffic to the blog, but if I 301′d them to the home page, the PR from the directory might follow. Not that it could get any worse than zero, but it might delay my return to pagerank.

That’s when it hit me: I redirected the most trafficked directory pages to the advertising page. They want to promote their site, right? And your advertising page is not something you intend to score high in Google. If you’ve got promotional pages – directories, landing pages, etc. – that are hurting you but still getting lots of hits, redirect them to a legitimate advertising page. I haven’t sold an ad or gotten a new feed subscriber from this yet, but I am getting hits to a perfectly innocent legitimate page.

Got spammers?

If spammers have duplicated your content and are outranking you, this is obviously hurting your site. Check this post for suggestions what to do about sploggers that steal your content.

Getting quality inbounds

There’s nothing you can do to get rid of spammy inbounds. You could try to trace them back and ask webmasters to get rid of them, but I think a better use of your time and energy would be to focus on getting better inbounds. That’ll dilute the impact the spammy ones are having on your PR – over time. As I described above, Google is actually still sending me traffic with nothing but those inbounds to recommend me. Therefore, the bigger problem (in my estimation) is lack of good inbounds.

Good inbounds are natural, organic links. The search engines are just too good at picking up links that are about bots rather than humans. I mean, what human ever went to a directory site on purpose once the search engines got going? You need links that human beings have given you because they had a reason to link to you. There is no shortcut on this process. Here’s how it works:

Create content that’s worth linking to.
Email any pals in your niche and let them know you’re doing something cool they should check out and link to.
Participate in niche forums that let you have a link in your signature. This is not about getting an inbound from that signature link – many of them are nofollowed anyway. No, what you want to do here is actually participate in the forum. Answer questions. Give out helpful information or advice. Be funny. Have personality. Do any of that stuff that you can, and people will get curious about your link, check out your site, see the content that’s worth linking to, and link.
Do this for at least 6 months before expecting a result. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but I warned you this is a long term project.
If you have an ad budget and know where to advertise, buy graphic ad space to send new traffic to your site. Nofollow text links might be okay too, but graphic ads are safer in terms of not offending The Goog.

The good news about today versus a few years ago is: years ago, you had to hope for other bloggers and webmasters to link to you. But now, if you’re in a young or techie niche, all sorts of readers might link to you on their Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or LiveJournal. Oh, and don’t forget StumbleUpon. There are tons of social networking sites that can send you new inbounds and new traffic that actually converts.

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