MYNIPPON rebooted: results and experience

As many of you know, sometime in late August 2004, MYNIPPON.com was literally rebooted. Or in other words, the website was completely redesigned with a new layout and Google AdSense text ads were incorporated replacing many of the affiliate programs that we were initially marketing (plus we had to make some content changes to comply with the new terms of service). For a website with approximately 1,000 pages, it was no small task. While we were able to get the new complete website online in about two weeks, the changes were far too many and we are guessing that it drove the spiders nuts. God knows how they interpreted all the changes.

The traffic did drop from our previous highs (and it was expected) but the quality of our traffic has improved exponentially. We are now attracting the right kind of audience that fits better with our new strategy. How did we do it? By shifting the focus of the content to target our audience.

What did we learn from the reboot?

1. If resources allow you to, do not bring down the website completely. Make a copy, do the redesign, and then publish it again.
2. Do not delete a page from the web. It is better to change the content of a page, but it might lead to lower rank in search engines but eventually it will percolate through the system and you will achieve your initial rank.
3. If you want to completely remove an article, clean up the page, and just put a link to another page on your website. Do not use the redirect command (while more convenient, search engines do not like it).
4. Do not delete any images from the web even if you are no longer using them on a page. It appears that the images seem to stay in the index for years after they have been removed from the website. You will only get too many error messages because of that.
5. While Google spiders visit MYNIPPON.com about 3-4 times a day on an average, they don't do a perfect job of updating. Some content in the cache can remain unchanged for weeks or even months. So just be patient and let the system update itself over time.
6. Keep your fans in the loop so that they can be patient while you are renovating the website. If you change the architecture of the website, make sure that you provide search capabilities (see examples of search on MYNIPPON) so that old fans can still easily find what they are looking for.

Recommended link: Why you should use content management tools to simplify nanopublishing?