The Ugliest Site in teh World makes $15k per month

[bluffspot]

Hi All - what a weird Saturday... the kind where I am shaking my head. There is a point to my post -

A good client of mine just bought a 7 year old site which happens to be the fugliest site on the planet and looks like a 10 year old, blind, arthritic, crazed with syphilis, lab monkey made it. I didn't ask said client how much he paid - I wouldn't have...Now, while the the site is a solid PR3 - none of his inner pages have any rank - even for its age. At first I was kind of pissed he didn't ask my opinion or ask me to look into the valuation I would have looked it over for free, this is a good client and one who is fun to work with - but he bought it and then hired me to switch it from a static site to a WP blog style format. But...

He's really worried that the switch to a WP blog will hurt his revenue. I'm kind of laughed... what revenue? So I had to ask him "what revenue" thinking he made maybe a few bucks of adsense per day. Not quite - he sent me the xls - and I verified it and validated it this week. He gets 14000 people to this piece-o-crap monthly... and he makes $15k per month in Adsense, CJ and a couple of others combined......whaaaaat...tf??

The only thing I can think of is that the site is so damned fugly that people are desperate to click on something to get the hell out of there. The content is awful, the ads are thrown around via the spray and pray method... but then I saw his bounce rate and analytics....

A semi-decent 50% bounce with an average time on the site of 3+ minutes... "huh?" and WTF???? I was perplexed. I then dug around found that the previous owner had gotten quite a few backlinks over the years to each of these articles and the hit rate was not too bad.

Now, this site is a few years old but, I think the lesson here is that you must do your article marketing first and foremost - and, get a few backlinks to those articles and of course - use a good resource box. The site has 500 articles to it and 8000+ backlinks - ok - so its one of the reasons I write a couple of pieces everyday - am getting tired of it - but I do it every day (autoblogger coming soon ) -

Now here's my question - I am about to switch this site to a huge blog theme - I will be setting the adsense up and of course peppering the articles with CJ ads and such - I of course will be using a redirector plugin to help manage the links... but - I am a tad worried that maybe... just maybe... his revenue will fall a tad - this part has me freaked out - if you can think of the worst site on the planet making money and then revamping it... would you expect to lose a little money the first month or expect it to grow now knowing it is properly optimized?

The site apparently did twice this amount when it was really active 2 years ago but has dropped significantly due to zero action by the owner - my next job will be to market it once the site change is complete - so -

Do you think the site will drop in sales with a new design? And I know its hard to judge without seeing the old vs. the new - but... whaddya think?

[DanielLambert]

I'm thinking the best thing to do would be to do some sort of split test where visitors either go to the old site or new site design and you can then track which does better.

[The Bird of Prey]

In all seriousness and with heartfelt sincerity...

Hasn't anyone ever heard the old axiom...

IF IT AIN'T BROKE... DON'T FIX IT!!!

Forgive me, but the only thing I'd do with a site that made ~15k a month is cash the checks as quickly as possible!

[tyrowen]

In all seriousness and with heartfelt sincerity...

Hasn't anyone ever heard the old axiom...

IF IT AIN'T BROKE... DON'T FIX IT!!!

Forgive me, but the only thing I'd do with a site that made ~15k a month is cash the checks as quickly as possible!

That.

If you are to make any change to the site, do it very slowly and gradually.

[bluffspot]

I'm thinking the best thing to do would be to do some sort of split test where visitors either go to the old site or new site design and you can then track which does better.

Wonderment about splitting the design... the prob with the site is the site files and inability to go through that many articles - - - so the question still remains...

Do you think there would be a drop in sales with a new design" Realize that the site has dropped as the previous owner had not updated it in a long while - this site at one time did 3 times that amount... hence trying to increase exposure with proper placement and an easier way to add files - - a

am wondering if moving all of this to a blog format with proper categories and such would hurt it... I know it would definitely increase in traffic.. but the sloppy monetization might be working better...?

[DanielLambert]

Wonderment about splitting the design... the prob with the site is the site files and inability to go through that many articles - - - so the question still remains...

Do you think there would be a drop in sales with a new design" Realize that the site has dropped as the previous owner had not updated it in a long while - this site at one time did 3 times that amount... hence trying to increase exposure with proper placement and an easier way to add files - - a

am wondering if moving all of this to a blog format with proper categories and such would hurt it... I know it would definitely increase in traffic.. but the sloppy monetization might be working better...?

Try it but keep the old files so if it goes wrong then just revert.

[Noxter]

What's making people think it can't get any better... I don't understand? I'd revert to a said template, keeping the original files on hand. If by chance (after a weeks worth of testing ad position) the CTR doesn't improve, I would revert it back. Just be careful with this guy's investment.

Might want to timemachine the website to see what changes the original owner made.

[diveup]

Pretty crazy income for a site that receives 14.000 visitors monthly, my opinion is to leave everything as it is for now and observe first what converts best, most profitable ad spots, I would leave these as they are, then change a bit at a time. wooot niche is this and what percentage of the total income is adsense/cj?

[bluffspot]

The prob with the site is that there are so many articles, the previous owner just never set them properly into categories... the the root is a mess. I am going to split test and throw some traffic at the new domain to see what will happen. I think the new layout is much cleaner, but, maybe its the old layout that people dig - unsure. If you saw the site you too would be scratching your head on how this piece-o-crap converts - I was and still am - but the ct are amazing - I have been following the original owner around the web now for the past week and this lady really knows her shiite - she has a few more sites like this with almost the same layout - except now I see her transmogrifying (ie:calvin/hobbes) her sites to a wordpress... go figure - I think she has caught on to what I am attempting to do with her old site... unsure

I will tell you this... she is an article marketing fiend - it appears she is pumping out an article every other day or so for her sites - she hasn't even touched on making any vids for her sites nor truly optimizing the pages - I mean, I have some sites converting... but damn

So for those that don't believe in article marketing or dont want to take the time to do it - - - -- reread this post - in a few weeks I'll divulge the site address - you'll see what I mean. Do the math - 11-14k visitors and they are clearing 15k + per month, bounce of 50% and avg time of 3+ minutes per - wild #s - no true SEO or advertising on this site save for a few hundred articles posted at 7500 other sites.......

So - what I am going to do is flip this project around and clean up every single page - remove junk code, line up the tags with the content and introduce some better tracking - and then throw some videos, active pr and backlinks to some of the more high performing pages - I am going to still build the WP site and keep it on hand - but I think it will be a month before it is complete - I think it has to be FN perfect before the release...

@noxter - no changes - how it was made in 2005 is exactly how it appears today, albeit more articles on the site -

[JeffT]

Is she posting the same articles on her site to the directories or does she write different articles just for the directories? And I take it she doesn't spin them either which should be further proof that spinning is pointless.

[DanielLambert]

Is she posting the same articles on her site to the directories or does she write different articles just for the directories? And I take it she doesn't spin them either which should be further proof that spinning is pointless.

Most likely doesn't, heck just steal the blog posts on your competitors sites and use them.

[JeffT]

haha that's a good idea and something I might start doing!

[DanielLambert]

haha that's a good idea and something I might start doing!

I read it on bluehatseo. Makes sense really seeing that it takes time to write original articles and original articles should be on your blog and the potential fact that the directories could out rank you for some of your long tails.

[bluffspot]

I havent seen a spun article yet - I believe all of her content is pure... although, it could very well be that she doesn't believe in spinning - I'll find out in a few weeks and fill in the blanks -

[Ganceann]

The idea of spun articles is only for promotional purposes while original articles should always be kept for your own site.

Spun articles come in different forms where sentences may be spun, phrases within sentences may be spun, paragraphs may be spun or virtually every synonym could be spun.

Before spinning too off, many people used article rewriting to promote their sites. They may have had one main original article on their site and done a handful of rewrites covering parts of the main article. The rewrites where submitted to as many article directories as possible or to selected article directories.

In this case, as the site is a few years old, spinning is unlikely to have been used at the start as it was in its infancy and the early spinners produced garbage. However, spinning could have come into play at a later date and built on the earlier promotional work undertaken by the original owner.

[jacky8]

In all seriousness and with heartfelt sincerity...

Hasn't anyone ever heard the old axiom...

IF IT AIN'T BROKE... DON'T FIX IT!!!

Forgive me, but the only thing I'd do with a site that made ~15k a month is cash the checks as quickly as possible!

Well, I fully agree with The Bird of Prey.

If the site is making all that money, it is due to the linkjuice it has pointing to its page. If you mess around with the CMS or try fixing, you never know where you'd go wrong and even the change in the internal linking structure of the site may lead to a drop in SERPs.

I'd say Don't Fix it.

The site apparently did twice this amount when it was really active 2 years ago but has dropped significantly due to zero action by the owner

That's great actually. Take this another way. The site has ONLY DROPPED TO HALF with zero action! With the new competition, no updates or new artificial links, it could have gone worse in 2 years. But it didn't. Its fair proof that the whole site set up is functioning very well, so there's no need to fix it. Google is weird and you shouldn't take the risk imo

I'd suggest you to rather focus your efforts on marketing. Get some high quality links and update the site to hope to not only maintain your position but to slowly get back to where it was 2 years ago. Good Luck!

[020207]

Great Lesson.

Regards,
Srinivas
Quote:
"To find Diamonds you have to get into a coal mine" "but it gets is price & face value it its properly shaped"

[Noxter]

If the site is making all that money, it is due to the linkjuice it has pointing to its page. If you mess around with the CMS or try fixing, you never know where you'd go wrong and even the change in the internal linking structure of the site may lead to a drop in SERPs.

Huh?

Inbound links have nothing to do with a websites design, as far as Google sees it (unless manually reviewed). Only problem I see with this is onpage SEO, which I'm sure Bluff can handle, in regards to understanding basic principles.

I think what you were getting at was permalinks. If you replace the proper redirect on it, it doesn't matter... all LJ transfers to the new link structure. Google just doesn't favor it going to another domain (in which case it will transfer not the full amount of LJ, maybe 90 - 95% <- my own case study). I would personally keep the old link structure though (less work).

IF IT AIN'T BROKE... DON'T FIX IT!!!

Lol, where is the duct tape? I only hear this from country folks. The quote makes me laugh... and I don't know if whether I agree with it or not. Lol, guess it depends on the situation!

P.S/Edit @ Bluff, really interested in you revealing the monster. I've always been looking to make high 5 figures with Adsense, without much work... and I think I just found out how (hopefully). Guess I could stop being a cheap sake and muster up 5 bucks per SEO'd article, but meh! I have some resources available. Problem is, my GF has the access and is requesting 25% of net profits. What the flip.

And I have a question for you Bluff -- people are linking this site up organically after (if I read correctly) a little link building was done (mostly bookmarks). Also, what color is the ad text compared to the text on the page (standout or blind in), as well as the ad block itself? Don't think "ad blindness" is much of a problem?

[bluffspot]

@noxter - there are a few hundred pages on this site so what I did was revamp the css and delete all the junk spaghetti code on each page. I was able to reduce the page size to nearly half which is certainly helping the speed of the load - as well - removing the dozen or so tables within each page and making it all one table - they didn't pay me enough to div out the site....

the ad links were a nasty looking brown to and would hover to orange - the css was incorrect and the hover was placed with a BOLD so the text would jump - I fixed all that and went to my version of blue to hover orange - no bold - it should do even better.

As for articles - I am committed like a crackhead to fiverr.com - tellin ya - that site is simply perfect for marketers such as us... and the price is always the same... $5.

As for how the site got its links - and this is FN important - the author wrote new 300+ word articles for other blog sites and article sites - again no spun content but I will find out why shortly. She wrote at least an article + every few days. Her link structure on the articles at times only helps with the site and not good converting keywords. But I think I can attribute this to her starting out as most of the articles that need attention were written several years ago.

If and when you see the site you'll be shaking your head... no amazing graphics, no ultra blinky blink shiite - pure text with a header and a background....

As for the don't fix it - sorry - it has to be fixed. The backend looks like spaghetti and my 404 app is going nuts. I shouldn't have even placed it - getting hundreds of emails for failing file locations. I can imagine a spider not crawling the site but bouncing around like a ping pong ball in a pachinko. So, once I am done it will be ultra clean and ultra optimised. I am getting pretty jealous over the fact the site will convert tons higher once I am complete... but... I'll have one kickass testimonial. and.... we'll all have a new way of really looking at what is truly working for someone - no bullshit here - no hype - just what really works.

Report coming soon as I am complete with the site and I see the traffic results from my work.

Actually - hats off to the NC'er who hipped me to prlog.org - already see a bump in traffic just with my first PR. I decided to skip in a little marketing while I am rebuilding seeing as the file id's and extensions wont change to try and boost as I go.

[Zimok]

@noxter - there are a few hundred pages on this site so what I did was revamp the css and delete all the junk spaghetti code on each page. I was able to reduce the page size to nearly half which is certainly helping the speed of the load - as well - removing the dozen or so tables within each page and making it all one table - they didn't pay me enough to div out the site....

the ad links were a nasty looking brown to and would hover to orange - the css was incorrect and the hover was placed with a BOLD so the text would jump - I fixed all that and went to my version of blue to hover orange - no bold - it should do even better.

As for articles - I am committed like a crackhead to fiverr.com - tellin ya - that site is simply perfect for marketers such as us... and the price is always the same... $5.

As for how the site got its links - and this is FN important - the author wrote new 300+ word articles for other blog sites and article sites - again no spun content but I will find out why shortly. She wrote at least an article + every few days. Her link structure on the articles at times only helps with the site and not good converting keywords. But I think I can attribute this to her starting out as most of the articles that need attention were written several years ago.

If and when you see the site you'll be shaking your head... no amazing graphics, no ultra blinky blink shiite - pure text with a header and a background....

As for the don't fix it - sorry - it has to be fixed. The backend looks like spaghetti and my 404 app is going nuts. I shouldn't have even placed it - getting hundreds of emails for failing file locations. I can imagine a spider not crawling the site but bouncing around like a ping pong ball in a pachinko. So, once I am done it will be ultra clean and ultra optimised. I am getting pretty jealous over the fact the site will convert tons higher once I am complete... but... I'll have one kickass testimonial. and.... we'll all have a new way of really looking at what is truly working for someone - no bullshit here - no hype - just what really works.

Report coming soon as I am complete with the site and I see the traffic results from my work.

Actually - hats off to the NC'er who hipped me to prlog.org - already see a bump in traffic just with my first PR. I decided to skip in a little marketing while I am rebuilding seeing as the file id's and extensions wont change to try and boost as I go.

I'm very curious to know if cleaning up house will convert more. I hope you have backups of the old version.

The reason I say this,

I know someone who had a wicked converting site(who looked like a POS), they decided to basically 'fix' it. Things went bad, and very quickly - it basically killed the site. The person simply restored the last backup before they decided to mess with it, and voila, everything back to normal. Don't delete those 'old' versions until you absolutely know from stats that you did indeed fix things.

[jacky8]

Noxter, yeah onpage seo is one area where mistakes could be made.

If the site is made of several html pages, she might have placed some links in a custom sidebar (there are several things like that) I'm saying this because I have worked on sites that are just a collection of nicely done pages in dreamweaver or something - they don't have any cms but still rank well.

Messing around with the post area may prove bad if you end up making some mistakes unknowingly. There can be several issues with heading tags, manually placed 'related links' with appropriate anchor text (will you remove them?) , onsite links (such as inter-post anchor links) Redirection may work but you never know. Google's principles aren't transparent.

@Regarding the quote, anyone is dumb to make fun of old quotes. You may laugh them away but these quotes are very basic and apply to everything in our lives. There's a reason why they are called Wise Men Quotes.

[Noxter]

@Regarding the quote, anyone is dumb to make fun of old quotes. You may laugh them away but these quotes are very basic and apply to everything in our lives. There's a reason why they are called Wise Men Quotes.

A wise man never wrote this quote, a lazy; flawed individual has. I have a problem with the quote in this situation and no, I'm not "dumb" for saying so. You are quite bold... but I like that. Choose your words a bit more carefully next time.

Please, do not release your own product under that same logic. And if you do, do not promote it here on this forum.

How about this for a "wise" quote: test, test, test... and test some more. Test until you are optimal.

And if you are here ranting about nothing:

As for the don't fix it - sorry - it has to be fixed. The backend looks like spaghetti and my 404 app is going nuts. I shouldn't have even placed it - getting hundreds of emails for failing file locations.

Source: http://www.nichechoppers.com/ilikeerrors

Noxter, yeah onpage seo is one area where mistakes could be made.

If the site is made of several html pages, she might have placed some links in a custom sidebar (there are several things like that) I'm saying this because I have worked on sites that are just a collection of nicely done pages in dreamweaver or something - they don't have any cms but still rank well.

Messing around with the post area may prove bad if you end up making some mistakes unknowingly. There can be several issues with heading tags, manually placed 'related links' with appropriate anchor text (will you remove them?) , onsite links (such as inter-post anchor links) Redirection may work but you never know. Google's principles aren't transparent.

Basic principles, check.

[jacky8]

Sorry if i offended you. It was just my opinion and I didn't call you dumb.

Maybe i love such quotes a lot, along with anything old / ancient historical or related to elders, but I'll try to make sure my love for such things doesn't make others unhappy.

[bluffspot]

Since we are on quotes for some odd reason...

"Rice is good for when you're hungry for 2000 of something" : Mitch Hedburg

thanks Jacky - I got it - thanks for looking out - as for coding - I don't use DW - it takes too long, I'm not a point and clicker - hence I code direct from notepad... from scratch - been doing this a while - - I do also own a copy of Coffee-cup HTML Editor 2008 - excellent software for looking at split screens while still being able to handcode.

---- Each and every page had a little over a dozen separate inner tables - 100 or so of the pages had almost 40 dead <td></td> remarks but no input - trust me - the bots are going to love this clean cut file when I'm done... could you imagine what this site would have done if it were cleanly validated form the start...?

or... were you saying that I should leave the bad code alone and simply stick to marketing and forget about onpage seo?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lets focus once again on the main question and then work forward a tad to see how this thread progressed:

Do you think the site will drop in sales with a new design? And I know its hard to judge without seeing the old vs. the new - but... whaddya think?

...was the original question. But then decided to leave it all alone and simply optimise each and every page.

So what we have now is a site where the main index page used to be 44k and now its a healthy 22k - I removed a lot of shiite - have made one table for the page and removed all the inner tables and threw in some div statements to do so. Again - over a dozen tables within the page - looked crazy...

So, I'm going to keep the file structure the same and simply introduce a blog in one of the nav links. Also - the site did not have inner links properly titled... lots of work here - hell, the header wasn't even labeled -

What I am going to find out now, seeing as how the site is coming together and how it was marketed (was not a planned site... trust me) - going to use this site as an example of what to do right when marketing the product (the site) - not necessarily how it was designed and coded. Once I find out more I'll keep reporting here much like a journal -

now then.....

For those of you who love tables and don't think having too many wont hurt your site: - go stand on the roof of your house... take your dining room table and put it out in the yard. Now place an article on the table. Next - get your breakfast nook table and place it on the DR table. Now take your living room coffee table and place it on top of the breakfast nook table... Now I want you to place your end tables on top of the coffee table. Now tell your buds to go get your nightstands and throw those on the end tables....can you see your article now? Yes....sure can, but only if you dig through a shitload of tables.... this is how your bot feels -

Do yourself a favour table lover - learn how to create a CSS file - and div statements. Thats like working with plexiglass.

This was not directed at anyone in general - just those ancient few who believe having a number of tables within tables within tables is not a problem.

Found a most impressive resource for speeding up pages: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

-

[narres]

So how is this site doing after the clean-up... any updates?

[bluffspot]

Cleanup is complete - waiting for the numbers so it shouldnt be too much longer - but it does look tons better - will fill you guys in shortly - I havent forgotten

[narres]

Cleanup is complete - waiting for the numbers so it shouldnt be too much longer - but it does look tons better - will fill you guys in shortly - I havent forgotten

Inquiring minds want to know...

[bluffspot]

ok - its a funny thing. Traffic has gone up considerably... best month so far in the past 4 years - (I have this data) - but... the money is a tad down - still trying to get real numbers so am not going to post until I have it all -

Traffic is up additional 87 ppl per day - not bad but not where I wanted it to be at this time. Then again looking at the figures from the past few years - it is usually down this time of year - so great that traffic is flowing and they are getting picked up more... but the ctr is down by 5.5%... gotta figure something out...

[beatz]

Good to see that traffic is up, but maybe the way everything was placed before just gives a better ctr. I would like to see how the old site was and duplicate it for future websites and see how it would monetize. Maybe you can test out some things with it.

[lemonarian]

This might help: The Ultimate Heatmap | FREE PDF Download

[andrew_writes]

I'm thinking the best thing to do would be to do some sort of split test where visitors either go to the old site or new site design and you can then track which does better.

I agree, put the static html site in the back and link to it from the blog. Optimize the old content for the blog and then put a lot more of it based on your analytics.

You could also add a 404.shtml file to redirect to the old site since the link structure will be off by the new folder the site goes into.

Just a quick idea.

Why don't you just convince your friend to let you clean up the current site keeping the current structure but improving things over time as well as a new marketing campaign?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it but you must test it and modify it.