Case Study - Upgrading to VisioList

[Mark]

So a few years ago I was contracted to skin an Aardvark Topsite, the job went fine and the owner did a good job promoting and building it up. Over the past year or 2, he has sold the site to a new owner and the site has pretty much been neglected to the point of near death, many of the sites listed are no longer active, or even registered.

I made a deal and am now the new owner of this list

aatoplist.com

The list was setup primarily targeting traffic exchanges, but has many empty categories (which amounts to duplicate content.)

So priority #1 is to upgrade to VisioList

Priority #2 will be to clean out the dead links and categories

Priority #3 will be to freshen up the look and feel

Priority #4 will be to restart marketing and do some much needed SEO

Lets see how it goes

 

[Mark]

So after 2 hours on Day 1 here is the rundown of what was done.

1) Upgraded to VisioList

2) removed 27 categories which were empty or had less than 5 members, we now have just 4 categories and that number may shrink again tomorrow.

3) moved any orphaned members to active categories

4) generated screenshots for all members, and while watching the screenshots being generated I removed any dead domains.

5) deleted 132 Dead sites

6) inactive sites were left on the list so they can be emailed and invited to participate once again.


Some numbers:

6,230 - pages indexed by Google, lets see if VL can lower this and give better relevance
569,614- Alexa Global
126,440 - Alexa US
95 Links In (Alexa)


most of the traffic is from China, it appears there was an out of date wordpress installation on this account that had been exploited.

these are the top search phrases for the month of Feb, pure junk keywords. This site has nearly 0 organic traffic from Search Engines (just 21 Visits all this month from Google):

aatoplist.com 11 68.7 %
index.php?a=join 2 12.5 %
get your site advertised free 1 6.2 %
index.php?a=join toplist 1 6.2 %
www.toplist.com 1 6.2 %


UP Next....

Update the skin, setup some nice link code options, work on SEO, add a carousel to the front page to show off premium members.

 

[Mark]

Another 1 hour on Day 2

1) Did some work with wrapper to cleanup overall layout, and small tweaks to New Members plugin. Started on pagination style and user_cp interface.

2) table_row - removed all outbound links

3) table_top_row - made title a link to site details page, added "visit" link with nofollow

4) table_top_row_premium - made title a link to website. Adds good value to premium listings as these are now the only listings that go direct to the site when you click the title.

5) Integrated a couple Google Ad zones

6) using the SEO plugin I made site title the <h1> tag on the home page, and put the meta_description as supporting text underneath.

7) All xternal links opened a new window, I removed all of these.

8) Started researching what keywords I want to target for the 4 active categories.

9) looked at current indexed pages and start planning for what pages I need to create, and which are most important to rank high:
a) Home Page (overall Rankings)
b) Join Page
c) Custom Page Explaining Benefits
d) Custom Page Explaining Premium Benefits




things are starting to come together
http://www.aatoplist.com/


Up Next... update category h1, title, category descriptions, and internal links. Also style the stats page and user_cp a little more. Still need to setup some nice link code options, and add a carousel to the front page to show off premium members

 

[Mark]

Time has been limited to work on things the past couple days, but today I got a little more work done.

Improved (slightly) category titles and descriptions
also requested Google remove all the pages of duplicate content I do not want indexed, and some of the old category URL's.

VisioList by default includes noindex meta tags on these pages, but to speed things along I used Googles remove URL tool, as well as robots.txt file

I have never done this via robots.txt before so we'll see how it works, here is what I used

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?method=
Disallow: /*?search=

that should prevent Google from indexing search results and different sort methods (sort list by hits in/out/pageviews)

 

[Mark]

So after a couple of weeks of letting things settle into place... traffic for some real keywords has started to increase, and our new URL's are being indexed.

Time for a few observations and tweaks

I notice we have a lot of these URL's indexed

?a=rate&u=aahits

and leftover search URL's

search/banner+ads+and+text+ads/

so I will create a rule using a plugin at global_start to have these pages dropped from the index since they offer no value

if($_GET['a'] == 'rate' || $_GET['a'] == 'search') {
 
$TMPL['head_extra'] = 'meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>';
 
}

Still need to work on the skin, but time has not been on my side as VisioList bootstrap theme is keeping me busy.

 

[Mark]

A picture says 1000 words VisioList FTW!

we started with over 6000 pages in Google index (as you can see above), and now have only 553 pages indexed. This translates to much less duplicate content and much more concise results.