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

You’re smart enough to know this so I would think you accounted for this but just in case.

PS….Did you die?

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 feeds
remove_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>

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

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.

Thanks for the info. When you add more backlinks to boost sagging traffic, how many and how often?

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.

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