SEO Issues - Build from scratch/ Relaunching a Site

Marketing
1

Hi All,

        I am looking to relaunch a website that i suppose has been penalized (or for lack of other appropriate words - isn't that more appealing to google and probably other search engines as well) by Google.

Although I suppose it’s still indexed by Google as the last googlebot visit was yesterday, i suspect it’s no longer on the Google (and probably others) priority list.

Why do i suspect this ?

  1. When i input the domain name(not including the .com) into google, although the number of results for the domain keyword is high, the actual link/indexed page to my site is only 1 and e that too is with the .info extension although the site is a .com.(Main domain on shared hosting is a .info)

  2. When i input the domain name(including the .com) into google, although again the number of results is high, there are actually only 4-5 links/indexed pages to my site

3)Number of page views has fallen considerably( only source of people coming to know about my site was through the search engines such as google as there was no other form of marketing) and now they alternate between 500-600 one month to 100-200 another month. I’m not sure why this is an alternating monthly pattern…

  1. No more new user registrations since past many months (as people might hardly be finding my site through Googe etc.)

What I have probably done wrong ?

I didn’t realize that this was an issue at the start but the …

1)Site built up Duplicate content due to duplicate postings over a period of time and probably different url’s pointing to the same content.

  1. I changed url structure / page url’s to make them more search engine friendly without redirecing the old url structure to the new one.

What I want to achieve ?

  1. Complete relaunch … all previous content will not be needed.

2)Same Domain Name as previously for the old site will be used.

  1. The content will now be intended for global community instead of a single specific country as with the previous site. Probably I might decide to use the old content for the country specific domain that it was intended for.

4)Probably hosting providers will be changed.

Looking forward to some of your insight and experience based on this.

2

Without seeing the site, it is rather hard to point out specific items that are “wrong”, so it is probably the usual reason: too little useful content, no logical structure, not enough diversity e.g. too many images and hardly any body.
One thing you don’t have to worry about, is comments leading to duplicate content penalties. The chances that random comments from random people lead to algorithms picking that up for duplicity is inifnitely small.
There is a vast amount of “start up” SEO information in this forum section alone; I suggest you read the relevant threads for a start.

3

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If you are completely rebuilding your site, then forget about what was wrong with the old one, and simply concentrate on building the best possible site to replace it.

The only problem with this approach is that any incoming links you have to pages that no longer exist will result in a 404 error. If the structure of your site will be basically the same, so that you can redirect these old pages to the equivalent new pages, that’s the best approach. If that’s not possible, for whatever reason, then your best course of action is probably to set up a really good 404 page, with helpful information which will enable any visitors arriving there to quickly locate the area of your site they wish to visit.

You might find Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide helpful.[/FONT]