I've Tried Killing This Blog... It will Not Die!

[Brad I]

Last year around this time, I moved my old blog to a new server and Wordpress theme. I thought after moving everything over, including my domain name it would eventually die out.

I tried to kill it!

I did all sorts of obnoxious things to move people from the old blog to the new one.

• I did autorefresh redirects - they didn't work well.
• I tried setting up spammy total Adsense pages.
• I contacted other blogs and asked them to update their links to my new blog.

People kept coming

Everything I've done to drive people away has failed miserably.

It's still getting massive traffic for a dead site. I haven't really done anything to it in a year, maybe fiddled here or there, I've changed the topic and tested Adsense in different locations, because I still pay Typepad for hosting.

Here are some stats from the past few days:


I might also mention, the Google pagerank went UP from a 4 to a 5 since I abandoned it.

Amazing... but what to do with this blog?

Last month, I switched the topic of the blog slightly, but I don't know if I want to dedicate alot of time to a new-old blog.

I could use some opinions. What would you do if it was yours?

[Brad]

I haven't used Typepad before, but if you can place PHP code into your template, I'd suggest using a PHP redirect. This code must be placed before any HTML output is printed.

<?php
header("Location: www.yournewblog.com");
?>

Please let me know if this works for you -- if not, we can brainstorm to come up with something else.

- Brad

[Brad I]

Thanks Brad, I'll see if I can insert that code. It would be nice if there was a way to redirect to specific posts

[MikeR]

Hi Brad,

I see two big reasons why you may be experiencing continued elevated traffic on the old site. Your sitting on a small SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goldmine on two counts.

#1) Your using a trusted, authoritative parent domain which is likely earning
you an elevated PR ranking from Google.
#2) Your subdomain is keyword rich and probably is more relevant looking
to both humans and search engines than the new one.

Having your own domain is normally a good thing, but this may be one of the interesting exceptions to the rule.

My advice; Roll with it and take advantage of it. Post new content to the
site, but don't duplicate exactly what you have on the new one because this might result in some penalization from the search engines for having duplicate content. Use the old one as an opportunity to build your brand and authority. Link from the old site to content on the new site directly which should help pass some page rank down to the new one. (Some people will argue or debate the importance of page rank but it seems clear it still has *some* relevance in practice.)

You could use "301 Redirects" to point old article URL's to their new home - which the search engines crawling the old site should pick up on. Does typepad have a utility for this? (If not you'd need to update a .htaccess file on the website document root which is cumbersome if you have a good deal of articles.)

I hope this offers some insight,

Mike Reddin

[dixonge]

I also heard something recently, I think it was on the SEO Rockstars radio show, that if you display the RSS feed of your old site on your new one it will help build the SEO of the new site. Something like that. Just a thought.

[Brad I]

Mike R. Thank you so much for the insight. I really appreciate it. It's opened a whole new perspective for me.

I am now asking the question "can I write 2 self development blogs?" but a better question would be how could I sub-niche each of them so they are slightly different but in the same general genre... hmm..

[Brad I]

Originally Posted by dixonge

I also heard something recently, I think it was on the SEO Rockstars radio show, that if you display the RSS feed of your old site on your new one it will help build the SEO of the new site. Something like that. Just a thought.

When I figure out what I'll be posting to the old blog, I'll give the RSS feed a try. Sounds like a good idea. Thanks!