SEO 2020 FORUM

TimS · SEO Red Belt Joined: 01 Jun 2006 Posts: 65

I have 3 old sites that I want to convert to silo structure websites. 2 of them are over 7 years old and are PR4 and 5 websites, the other is 8 months old and is a PR2. All are indexed in all 3 search engines.

They are all subjects that I can easily write about and have profitable affiliate programs that are in the same subject. The dilema is that the 2 older sites haven't been updated in years, they would need a complete workover. I don't know if this would raise a red flag at Google. I would be keeping the themes the same, just adding a lot of good content in the silo structure.

The newer site is a blog that has 5 good articles but they are written with misspellings in mind. They get some traffic from Yahoo and MSN but are basically ignored by Google and are in supplimental results prison.

What would you do with these sites? Would you start any of them on a fresh domain or could I avoid the sandbox and aging delays by using these 3 domains? I'm going to scrap the blog on the newer site and go with a PHP website, but will have a blog on the backend.

Thanks. I know I've been asking a lot of questions lately.

TimS

Ahri22 · Posted: Tue Aug 22, 2006 10:47 pm Post subject:

I personally think you should go for it! No red flags should be raised by completely re-doing an old website. After all, most sites that have been around for a few years have gone through updates and changes.

Once you've revived the sites with some fresh content and built them with a siloed structure, you should see some good results (of course, I'm no expert on this Smile

however, I'd imagine that the spiders will get excited by some new activity).

With the sites' ages, I don't think you'd have Sandbox issues.

Cheers
Fiona

sidhale

Hi Tim,

TimS · SEO Red Belt Joined: 01 Jun 2006 Posts: 65

I actually have the site structured with folders, but it is with a .shtml extention. I use php now. Although it isn't a big deal I suppose I do like to have everything in unison. The site is about 90 pages now, I plan on taking it much further than that since it can go in that many directions within the same theme. I made the page about 8 or 9 years ago but because I was so picky it ended up being in a silo structure.

So so you think I should keep the old pages and site structure? I could just redesign the pages and make them act like php pages and any new pages that are added I could create with the php extention.

What do you think?

sidhale · Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 10:09 pm Post subject:

Sure Tim,

If you're planning to add a LOT of new pages, and you are really obsessive (anal), after you are getting scads of traffic from the new pages and can afford a brief, slight downturn in traffic, you can rename the old pages.

You'll have to make sure all your internal links to those pages are OK after the change, but then they'll get indexed very quickly and if the replacement pages get higher rankings in the SERPS your traffic should rebound pretty quickly.

sid

TimS · SEO Red Belt Joined: 01 Jun 2006 Posts: 65

Thanks. I'm not sure why I didn't think of that but it makes good sense.

TimS

Ahri22 · Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 2:13 am Post subject:

I stupidly decided to change a site from html to php...because it was PR0 and wasn't getting a great deal of traffic I just went for it! Over 500 pages all changed...

Of course, at the PR update, my home page went to PR4 and naturally, all the internal pages are PR0. When I check the links to my site, I discovered that a lot of the links (to the home page) were links from pages within the site, that obviously were considered by Google (at the time) to be PR4 (as I've heard Google only shows PR4 and above backlinks using the link: command)...and none of which exist any more!!

The good thing is, the home page retained it's PR4 as the links were all to the domain and not the extension! However, I found that the php pages were indexed quite quickly by Google...and I figure that given a few months it'll be back where it could have been...

Fiona