Does Google Expect More from a WordPress Site?
We all have them, WordPress driven Product Review Sites that we built, indexed, marketed, and walked away from for several months while they ferment. I mean, if you follow the N1Way Guide – it is very clear that you should do only whats needed, and nothing extra. I have been using WordPress for several years now and have a lot of visitor data to compare to… its very interesting! We have all heard and said that Google Loves WordPress, but it seems to me, they ONLY Love it, if its actually managed like a blog!
As I parse my way through my monthly visitor stats every month, I noticed one thing over and over… the ebb and flow of traffic on sites built with WordPress, seems to follow the frequency of posts, almost to a tee! It’s almost like search engines expect a site built with WordPress to be updated more frequently, well…, like a blog or journal would be.
After all, if you visit the Wikipedia page, a Blog is a Journal, WordPress, was developed as a Blog Platform first! Here is where it gets interesting…. If you look up Niche Blogging on Wikipedia, it makes it sound kinda bad, like Internet Marketers use WordPress to build Niche Websites and monetize them with ads! Sound familiar? Google itself recently revealed that they know MUCH MORE about your site than you may think! They know what CMS you use, they know what plugins you use, etc.
So… <if> site CMS = Blog/WordPress <then> Expect blog-type, daily journal updating <or> May be a niche blog aka splog.
For Example -
The typical visitor pattern with WordPress sites is this:
<Launch> Good Traffic for 30-90 Days
<Post Launch> Traffic Slows steadily without Regular Updates after the 90 day period
I have one niche site that I posted new content, an average of 4 times a week, every week, over the course of 14 months. During that 14 month period of time, every month saw an increase in search driven traffic. In August, the site was serving up about 6500 pages a day. At that point, I became complacent and reduced my posting frequency to only once a week. The traffic has slumped to reflect my lack of enthusiasm.
I started paying attention to the trend at the end of October… so in the month of November, I decided to increase my post frequency again, from once a week to 4 times a week… you guessed it, the traffic picked right back up again and the site has almost fully recovered to the 6500/day page views!
Just to be clear – I do NOT have a mailing list on the site and my RSS feed for the site is hidden and only has 22 subscribers. 90% of the traffic comes from search engines, the rest from inbound links around the web.
On another WordPress driven site, I lost interest in the site and gave it to a friend in June. When I gave it to him, traffic had slowed to just 2600 monthly pageviews. Since he took it over and began posting twice weekly to the blog again, it has increased to serve up 6900 last month. Again, updates to the site and traffic seemed to follow the exact same trend!
<if>(site CMS = Blog/WordPress) & (Site updates frequently) <then> send more traffic <or else> Don’t!
Just the Opposite on Other Sites
The next trend I noticed was that several of the other types of sites I have or manage for others, did NOT experience this same ebb and flow of traffic! With some of the older BANS sites – I have gone pretty far out of my way to remove ANY of the footprint left behind from BANS. Its much more than I can get into in this post, but removing the footprint seems to have made a difference, and the traffic steadily increases every month, regardless of my posting schedule, which is essentially, very little to none!
Example -
On one BANS-Only site that is 11 months old, I started with about 15 pages of article content and 95-100 pages of BANS generated eBay listings, with only 100-150 words above and below the listings. When the site launched last December, I published all of the articles and created all of the pages at the time I built it, and have not made a single change since. Not one.
Traffic to the site has steadily increased every month and the ONLY thing I have ever done is drop a link somewhere every now and again. No article marketing, no big link building campaign, no nothing… The site served up 484 pages per day in November, and has shown a 5-15% increase in traffic every month. Before someone blasts me for 14,000 monthly pageviews being shit… I realize that. BUT – you need to realize I have nothing but 1 day of my time invested in it, as opposed to the WordPress site that I have to invest a few hours a week into.
So… which was better?
Just for Kicks – I Checked Others
Anyone remember the Golf Putter Guide site I built and gave away to Tao at the N1Way Guide site? That site was stripped of all BANS footprints and several of the code blocks were rebuilt. The site was published in July 09 with 3 guides and 45 or so reviews, and has only had 2 more reviews added since, and those were in August! You guessed it, traffic has continued to grow at the rate of 10-20% each month. Last month, it served a total of just over 10,000 pages to visitors.
In case anyone wonders how the GPG site is doing, I asked Tao if it was OK to discuss the traffic before I posted it today. He told me the site instantly rolled right into his #3 top earning site!!
At the same exact time, I built a WordPress powered site with the same amount of content and effort… it came out of the box just as strong, but has slowly declined in traffic, as I have not updated it with one single new post since. The WordPress site, with the same effort… eclipsed on the second month at 14,320 monthly pageviews, and has been in a decline ever since! (Closed Nov with only 4670 monthly)
My Conclusions
Listen – I am not some scientist or tin-foil hat wearing member of some conspiracy theory club… but the traffic trends tell a story!
- If you Build a Niche Site with a Blog Platform like WordPress – Google <MIGHT JUST EXPECT> that it should be updated regularly, like a blog. If not, it may not grow. Other engines, don’t seem to mind one way or another.
- If you build a site with static html, or some other non-blog platform, Google may not expect regular updates from it, and it may not get the initial rush of traffic, but it seems to grow more steadily and maintain the traffic month over month.
This is one area that the N1Way Guide may need to be modified a bit. IF you build it with a blog platform, steady and regular updates may have more impact than just publishing it and walking away in 90-day increments. Which works OK on other static html or content platforms.
Just for Kicks – Open up the traffic stats for one of your own wordpress driven sites that has not been updated in 2-3 months. When did the traffic begin to decline? Can the last post date and the traffic swing be related in any way? Same week, same month, etc?
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Does Google Think Your Site Sucks?
- Feeding your Target Visitors the Food they Expect to Eat!
- Choosing a WordPress Template for your BANS Site
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
I get what you are saying. The blogs I update on a schedule seem to maintain or increase in traffic. The ones that I don’t seem to slowly drop too.
I guess the trick to it would be to upload all of your posts and then schedule them to go out on a weekly basis instead of all at once.
Going back to BANS will not happen for me. I’m addicted to WP now and its too easy to customize for me.
I’ve seen similar trends in my own sites, but the difference has been with how I have built my sites and how they are structured. I have several WordPress sites which out perform all of my other niche sites on ALL platforms and they never get updated……ever……period! The only thing I do is the occassional backlink building when SERP’s for various keywords decline. These sites look nothing like blogs, they function nothing like blogs and they do extremely well.
Now i’m intellegent enough to realise that the way I structure and layout my sites is not going to fool Google into thinking they aren’t WordPress but it’s just strange how these ‘static’ sites built, structured and researched in a particular way have always done better than any other of my sites including those built following N1Way. Therefore I believe that layout, structure and format all play a big part in how your site is viewed in the search engines and thus what Google ‘expect’ to see from it.
I don’t use WordPress for my own blog (a tech blog for Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/etc) but my own custom CMS. However I have also noticed with my own system that if I blog more frequently my traffic continues to increase. If I blog less frequently it tends to stagnate and sometimes even go backwards a little.
Naturally the more content you have the more ways there are to find a way into your blog via the search engines so it makes sense to have new content being added frequently anyway, but it is interesting how traffic can go backwards if you blog less frequently.
Posting new content more or less every day from the start of this year (which was my new year’s resolution last year) has resulted in an increase from around 60k pageviews in December 2008 to 230k pageviews in November 2009.
What’s interesting is it’s not just from the new content that I’m getting this additional traffic, but to existing content too. For example, from some articles posted in 2004, monthly pageviews from a year ago vs now:
2300 vs 3500
2100 vs 3400
1600 vs 3100
I guess this is probably a combination of factors (more people visiting the site means they’re more likely to be exposed to these pages and therefore more likely to link to them) but I’m certain that my frequent posting this year has been a major contributing factor.
@ Brad –
I agree completely about switching from WP back to BANS, but what about other content systems? (If they exist)
@ Ben –
I prefer a paged/static structure versus a category/post, structure on sites as well, and they seem to be hit or miss, again based on the frequency of updates.
You already know the new site I have in the works… so far, it is up to 460 +/- static-type pages, but will also have a very bloggish side of it as well.
Should be an interesting site when its ready to go!
@ Chris –
Interesting on the older pages… One of the things I have made a strong effort on over the several months is interlinking to at least one old post on every new post, within the context of the new post. (Versus relying on a related posts plugin)
I have noticed this brings GREAT results to pull the older pages back into the forefront of search targets again.
Mark
Great post Mark, I have noticed the same with some of my sites. A couple of my bans sites still get rankings with no updates from me(nothing to brag about) and when I do not update a wp site the rankings and traffic goes down until I update.
But who has time to update all of our sites regularly we would need a virtual assistant for that.
I would like to learn more about how to remove the bans footprint totally from a site.. That may be a way to go and just make great articles for each page and then only get links regularly and see what happens..
Great post Mark, but I have a slightly different PoV. I have always believed that sites are classified as those with RSS and those without one. With WordPress, everytime you write an article, Pingomatic gets pinging, and Google is told that a new article is posted.
At least after the advent of Twitter, the need for “real time web” is getting so important and Google thinks blogs are one place where you can find more updated content on a regular basis. When you stop updating content, Google stops getting the pings, and your site looks no more relevant to the real time web..
@Chris
The reason older pages are getting higher amount of traffic is also probably because Googlebot now has additional opportunities to visit them and crawl again.
The more pages Googlebot crawls and recrawls, the higher possibility for increased traffic.
@Anand That may well be a factor but I still believe that it is influenced by fresh new original content being added as well. Using your theory, all old pages would bring in more traffic over time no matter what else is happening on a website. I have numerous other sites that have been around for a similar amount of time to my main blog that do not have content that is ever updated and the traffic volumes are completely static.
Great post. Question. Do you think that google treats comments as updates to the blog? If so then encouraging comments by using programs like keywordluv etc would go a long way to maintaining traffic levels.
I guess this begs the question: Is it possible to remove the WordPress footprint?
@ Ben,
What is your method to building WP sites that are not updated that do so well?
Rochelle
@ Moobs -
Not sure really – They can definitely recognize the “Block” on a page that contains the comments, so its a good question as to whether they take it into account or not.
@ Rochelle –
Yes. BUT – its not worth the effort in my opinion. The minute you start changing the wp-content directory name etc, you will likely start having issues with plugins not working right, updates not working right etc.
Seems easier to me to just add posts more often.
I don’t know for sure about Ben’s methods… but I use a static page setup (Using pages for content versus posts) much more often than a category / post setup.
Mark
Hey Mark ~ Thanks for taking the time to write this post with so much detail! I really do appreciate it and I know others do too. I know you’re busy … any chance we can talk you into showing/telling us technophobes how to remove the BANS footprint? LOL … I don’t want to get rid of my BANS stores but I’d love to try to get back in Google’s good graces. I do fine with Yahoo and Bing … but not as well as I once did with Google. I am also trying to get a bunch of blog posts ready and scheduled for niche WP type sites. This is great proof that it’s worth it to do so. Thanks again!!! *huGs* Suzanne
@ Rochelle
Similar to how Mark has just said really, build static well optimized pages instead of posts, with content on each page……more in an e-commerce style I suppose. On the front end you wouldn’t know they were powered by WordPress from a visual point of view.
I don’t believe that there is anything special or unique about the way I’ve built these sites but they are VERY different to all of my other sites which they out perform but do similarly well to each other with repect to earnings and traffic.
Having said the above, on other sites which are more ‘blog’ structured I have seen the exact pattern described in this post.
@ Ben,
Thanks for the info. When you add more backlinks to boost sagging traffic, how many and how often?
Rochelle
In theory, this does make sense, but I wonder if it does have something to do with the sites with or without an RSS feed?
Or sites with or without a sitemap?
I have WP blogs that do sufficiently well without using a sitemap file at all and also ones that do. I don’t update either type more often than the other, but have recently started keeping a record of the work I am doing on each site. It will be interesting to see what happens to each one.
Several people have commented about the possible connection to an RSS feed and traffic. But, I’m confused about what connection is being made. Someone please clarify.
And, if we are creating static sites, how do we remove the RSS subscription button from the URL line? (Assuming, of course, that this might help our types of sites.)
Rochelle
@ Tao –
The RSS angle is interesting and may be related, not sure. I DO however have xml sitemaps on the static sites as well, and in effect, it is very similar to an rss feed. (You can actually submit an rss feed to google as a sitemap)
@ Rochelle –
I wouldn’t remove the RSS from a site just to remove it… BUT… if you just wanted to do, it can be sent as an exclusion command in your functions.php file. There are already several I do on my own sites, just to make them different.
This resides at the bottom of several of my static niche sites in wordpress.
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 ); // Removes the links to the extra feeds such as category feedsremove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 ); // Removes links to the general feeds: Post and Comment Feed
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'rsd_link'); // Removes the link to the Really Simple Discovery service endpoint, EditURI link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link'); // Removes the link to the Windows Live Writer manifest file.
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'index_rel_link'); // Removes the index link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link'); // Removes the prev link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link'); // Removes the start link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link'); // Removes the relational links for the posts adjacent to the current post.
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator'); // Removes the WordPress version i.e. - WordPress 2.8.4
< / code>
It removes a lot of things not needed by a static site.
Mark
I think you’d need to share more information on the WordPress issue….like niche for one. I am not asking you too but of course some of these are very seasonal and could change the traffic flow.
You’re smart enough to know this so I would think you accounted for this but just in case.
PS….Did you die?
@ Bill –
Its truly not niche specific… and is seen across MANY different markets, regardless of the site topic. The “search” driven traffic to this site ebbs and flows with post frequency also…
LOL – No death, but trying to close up a few local, open projects before the holidays. Local accounts like to push at the end of the year… spend it, or get taxed on it! :-)
M
There was a feeling earlier that it may have something to do with RSS pinging stopping when you stop posting. If this is the case then I’ve just found a plugin that will address it. It is called Post Recycler and it takes the oldest post, re-dates it and then pings it out. Not new content obviously, but active content in google’s eyes (maybe?) Not sure how effective it is, but it has to worth a try.
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