Through no fault of my own, posturown.com is definitely a failure. Google’s many algorithm changes made sure of it. Anything that even remotely looked like an article directory was penalized in the search engine results. Anyway, what started out like a good idea turned into an incredible waste of time.
Why did I Start that Website?
Originally, it was a way to give something back to the Internet Marketing community that taught me so much. I summed it up on the home page with:
To help you establish yourself as an online authority in any topic you choose.
To help you promote other relevant websites, including your own.
To help you and I both in making money with your articles.
It worked for a while, until Google stopped letting anything rank very well.
Article Abuse
Other than published articles that were pending, I didn’t pay much attention to that website, even less so for the past few months.
Even before it stopped doing well, some authors were trying to slide in crappy articles spun up from something else. I was spending way too much time reviewing and rejecting articles.
Over the past couple of months, most of the articles were little more than advertisements for apartment complexes in the US. I didn’t have a problem with this until… the author started using placeholders for links and keywords and sending basically the same article through with minor changes. I guess writing unique articles is too much work for some people.
Never mind the fact that most of the articles, including the apartment ones, seemed to be outsourced to people who couldn’t speak English well. I didn’t even mind the fact that a lot of the authors were linking to Hub Pages, Squidoo, Info Barrel and places like those.
Today, however, I concluded that enough is enough.
What have I Done and what am I going to Do?
Well, I published a short article on the site and said I wouldn’t be accepting any new articles. I then changed all of the user roles from contributor to subscriber, so they couldn’t actually do anything.
There are hundreds of broken links on old articles. The writers thought so well of me that they linked to places like blogspot.com and the sites were taken down either by they themselves or Google, or whoever ran the sites they linked to.
With the articles that have broken links, if they seem like decent articles, I’ll just remove the links. If they seem like crappy articles, I’ll just delete the articles.
There are a lot of articles with redirected links. Some of them are trailing slash redirects, some of them are www or non-www redirects and some of them are dead websites, pointing to a domain registrar’s parked page. It will take some time to figure out which is which, even though I use the Broken Link Checker plugin to help me along the way.
As of right now, there are 2,308 articles on that site. I imagine it will probably be closer to 1,000 in six months, which is probably how long it will take me to clean it up.
I won’t Kill the Site
And why should I? It will soon be three years old. If it should suddenly start to rank and the traffic should suddenly start to pick up, I would be a fool to discard it. I’m making $20 to $30 a month from it now and that could increase. Of course, it could also get worse.
Only time will tell and if things do improve, perhaps I’ll just use it as another site that I post random stuff on, making the title of the site completely different from the domain name itself.
Wait a Minute!
It’s partially my fault, I’ll admit that. I wasn’t strict enough with the submissions and I didn’t pay enough attention to the metrics. I’ve learned my lesson.