Recovering Failing SEO Sites with the Kitchen Sink Method

Around 550 results on google. 354 valid and 900 excluded on search console. <- does this mean quality is low or no? around 700 articles posts total and like 5-10 pages I believe.
The 900 excluded pages don't indicate anything. People panic about that but it tends to mean that Google is working the way it should and only showing canonical pages.

That you have such a broad discrepancy between 550 results on a site: search, 354 listed as valid in the Coverage Report, and 700 total posts tells me somethings really off with your content.

You mentioned in another thread that you didn't really format, set headers, add images, interlink, or whatever. I'd say that's part of your issue if we're talking about the same site.

Based on those numbers it also seems like you may have a bunch of random categories or tags. Is this the case? If so, I'd consolidate the categories some, and either get rid of all the tags or at least set the tag pages to noindex. That's what I'd do. Others around the net may tell you different, but I'm all about not diluting my page rank to worthless pages and bloating my indexation which reduces my sitewide quality score.

I have my article written date area removed so they don't know how old my article is. So, my articles can last longer.
Removing it from the user-facing part of the screen is only a part of the battle. If you're using a CMS like Wordpress and/or using plugins like Yoast then your date is likely still in the <head>. Not showing a date is an unequivocally bad thing for users. You're better off not showing the published date but showing the updated date, and updating that date so it's never super old.

Also, pretty much every page I have is a "money page" aka review.
Read this quote below from the opening post of this guide about this subject:

2) Google Fred: BoFu & Above-the-Fold
[...] Also, if your site is one of these Top10BestProductReviews.org sites that only works the bottom of the funnel, RIP. I doubt you'll recover. Do not publish only "money pages". You need more top of the funnel (ToFu) and middle of the funnel (MoFu) content than bottom of the funnel (BoFu). Or you're a spammer in Google's eyes. Yes, some sites survive, so what. 99% of them did not.
Google dropped an update called Fred that took care of this. People always argue with me about this point because there's survivorship bias. "But top15reviews.info didn't get hit" Yeah but everyone else did, and that stupid site will get hit in the next update. There's always a few survivors or sites that were new enough to slip through the cracks. Then they get kilt in the next update.

Also, for future sites, is it bad if I have affiliate links in info articles/supporting articles? I mean you can sell hard in info articles, but does that affect rankings?? Cus now it would be considered a money page right?
No, it's fine. I make more money from affiliate links in info articles than I do in reviews these days. And they still rank fine. I wouldn't hard sell in info articles because that goes against the intent of the search queries. Just mention the product if it's a good fit or helpful solution. You don't need to hard sell it at length, though. THAT can hurt your rankings for the very reason you stated: Google won't know if it's an info page that serves the intent of the query or if it's a bait and switch money page (which they created an algorithm update for maybe a decade ago).

Also, I didn't know about topical authority so, this site is on internet marketing basically. Extremely general stuff. From Affiliate Marketing, Dropshipping, Amazon FBA, Courses, WordPress Plugins, Webhosting, Funnel Creation Softwares, Make Money In X ways type of articles. Is this site like a complete waste or is it salvageable?
I'd say that's perfectly fine and a great way to form topical authority in that vertical. It's not a waste. It's kind of like gaining topical authority for Sports by talking about soccer, baseball, football, etc.

In my experience, you gain topical authority by including articles on a topic, not by excluding articles on other topics. You see the subtle difference there? Just because you DON'T talk about baseball doesn't mean you're suddenly more authoritative about golf. You have to talk about golf a lot, even if you talk about baseball.

Also, what do you recommend for say this site I have like over 120 affiliate links.
But, some are broken because I haven't gotten approved or someshit happened.
So should I bother sending them to the landing page even though the affiliates haven't approved me?
You're better served to not have broken links on your site, period. Your best move is to remove broken links. Your next best move is to make sure they're all nofollow regardless. You could send traffic to the landing page if it's not broken, if you're into giving them free sales. It's not hurting you and might be better than deleting the content if you can't get approved. Quality content is quality content and is good to have, even if you can't monetize it the way you intended.
 
I don't use any tags on any of my sites. Also, have no idea what breadcrumbs are. I yesterday switched to rankmath. You also said it's not a complete waste meaning it's salvageable so long as I write more supporting articles? The problem with this is to add the supporting articles to 700 articles, would that mean I need to add 700 or more articles pointing to each right? Also, most of the articles are review type so I would need 700 more articles right??

"You mentioned in another thread that you didn't really format, set headers, add images, interlink, or whatever. I'd say that's part of your issue if we're talking about the same site."

Yes, if I fix this you think I can recover without adding any more new articles?? If I improve each one and do some proper interlinking.

I didn't know that if you did topic clusters, it's easier to interlink them and it makes sense to interlink and this way you can build backlinks off only few supporting pages so the link juice flows on all. But, with 700 which aren't in tight clusters that's not possible.

Also, you think there is a plugin that updates each blog post's date every month or so?

How would I know if my backlink profile isn't one to blame? Like I had bought web 2.0s and some other stuff and I also disvowed some links so I bought a package from a guy from legiit and he finds the spammy ones and you disvow them. That only hurt my rankings more.

Also I read these 3 errors do you know how to fix them?
-> /wp-content/plugins/social-warfare/assets/fonts/sw-icon-font.woff?ver=4.1.0 net::ERR_ABORTED 404
-> /wp-content/plugins/shortcodes-ultimate/includes/fonts/fork-awesome/forkawesome-webfont.woff2?v=1.0.11 net::ERR_ABORTED 404
-> mywebsite com/detroitchicago/cmbdv2.js?gcb=195-0&cb=03-5y0c-5y18-4&cmbcb=20&sj=x03x0cx18&abt=UseStandaloneForAll net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT

I don't even use social warfare anymore. I tried installing and uninstalling shortcodes ultimate. and that last one i don't even get.
 
"You mentioned in another thread that you didn't really format, set headers, add images, interlink, or whatever. I'd say that's part of your issue if we're talking about the same site."

Yes, if I fix this you think I can recover without adding any more new articles?? If I improve each one and do some proper interlinking.
I don't know if you'll recover from doing this. But without doing this, there's zero point in you asking any other questions or doing any other work on the site. If you aren't going to do the very basics, you're wasting your time, Google's time, any website user's time, and BuSo user's time. You don't need to worry about advanced topics until the basics are covered.
 
I don't know if you'll recover from doing this. But without doing this, there's zero point in you asking any other questions or doing any other work on the site. If you aren't going to do the very basics, you're wasting your time, Google's time, any website user's time, and BuSo user's time. You don't need to worry about advanced topics until the basics are covered.
I only ask to see if it's better to work on my other sites or recover this that's all.
 
I only ask to see if it's better to work on my other sites or recover this that's all.

Give this site a fair shake first before you reach for any conclusions. I think that's kind of the point. What you're asking cannot be known until you've done what must be done.
 
I don't know if you'll recover from doing this. But without doing this, there's zero point in you asking any other questions or doing any other work on the site. If you aren't going to do the very basics, you're wasting your time, Google's time, any website user's time, and BuSo user's time. You don't need to worry about advanced topics until the basics are covered.
Okay. so basically I am looking over at some of my articles, some aren't that bad, I just realized for some of the pages I have:
nerd wallet, g2. and all these MASSIVE sites ranking. Should I get rid of these articles? There's no way I am gonna be ranking since I won't be adding supporting articles to increase relevancy.
 
You can lead a horse to water, but somehow if it is determined to it will shoot itself in the foot, twice.” - CCarter​

There's no way I am gonna be ranking since I won't be adding supporting articles to increase relevancy.

"How long is a piece of string?"

You seem to ignore all the obvious advice telling you that you need to change your attitude and mindset first, rather you turn around and ask questions that are deflections.

You have so much fear and negativity, couple that with laziness and lack of work ethic, I am not sure how you even manage to get yourself out of bed let alone try to compete in this world for what you want.

If this is the generation coming up, they're already dead. You want a guarantee that if you do X, lazily, you'll succeed. The only guarantee is death, that it. You can put in 10 years of work and fail, that's life.

So either get to work or don't, no one give a fuck. You getting money or not will not impact any of us.

You're just a number to the world and right now you stand at 0. Take action or don't, everything else is procrastination based out of fear.
 
  1. Indexation Quality - Look for big problems like blank pages being indexed, security issues with auto-generated spam pages, search query pages being indexed, and extremely low quality content being published.
  2. Link Problems - Accumulating, without your awareness, crap like PBN links, automated web 2.0 PBN links, bad neighborhood links, etc. Also over-optimized anchor text profiles.
  3. Page Speed - I'd improve this as much as is reasonably possible. It can act as a ceiling on your potential rankings, because Google doesn't want to send their users to sites with bad user experience.
welp it worked.
Did a little bit of number 1 and a ton of number 3 and fixed some issues relating to word filtering. Never did anything to disavow links.
Climbing like crazy and starting to get a very nice flow of clicks from money keywords.
Never had this much response to promotion / 301s before.

Starting to think page speed optimization and paying attention to what you're indexing for is a holy grail money making process if you have an existing traffic base.

Looking at your big list again and trying to pick a couple more items to try.
 
4) Indexation Bloat & Quality
Do a site:yourdomain.com search on Google and note the total indexed pages there. Look in Search Console's index reports and check the total there. Do they match with your number of published posts and pages? If they're low, you have a quality problem and Google doesn't want to waste resources on your crap. If it's high, then you have a bigger problem which is also dragging down your Panda quality score. Find it and fix it. I go as far as to noindex paged archive pages that are paginated, like /category/page-2/ but always allow the first page to be indexed. Always keep them all dofollow, because the page rank will still flow.
I tried the site:yoursite.com on google and a bunch of Page 12 of 15 - Site title is showing up. Is that what you mean by archived pages that are paginated?
 
@Ryuzaki I've been awfully quiet lately with my head down still cranking on my kitchen sink method site. Figured I'd share another update here. While I don't make a TON of money here, if this were a high-paying niche I'd be doing a lot better. That said, I'm super happy with it and glad as heck that I listened to Ryuzaki with this site. It works if you work it.

What are my next steps here? Simple:

1. I post an update daily (at least one).
2. I continue to optimize posts/pages.
3. I keep looking for new monetization methods.
4. Repeat the process.

My goal is to hit 1,000 posts on this.

Unfortunately, this site will not be able to hit a ton of money a month or retirement exciting level like that, but with consistency, it could be something decent.

Thank you again Ryuzaki!

zis3K0U.jpg
 
I tried the site:yoursite.com on google and a bunch of Page 12 of 15 - Site title is showing up. Is that what you mean by archived pages that are paginated?
Sorry, I missed this. Yes, that is precisely what I mean. Wordpress calls them “paged” pages and you can add an easy chunk of code to noindex any “paged” pages so that only the first page of an archive is indexed (whether category, tag, author, date archive, etc.).

You can use the category descriptions to add unique content to each of these remaining indexed pages, too. Even 50-100 unique words is better than zero. I like to display the category description below the title and use it like an introduction paragraph to explain what the archive is about. Nothing complex. It’s such an easy way to improve your average index Panda quality score.
 
You can use the category descriptions to add unique content to each of these remaining indexed pages, too. Even 50-100 unique words is better than zero. I like to display the category description below the title and use it like an introduction paragraph to explain what the archive is about. Nothing complex. It’s such an easy way to improve your average index Panda quality score.
Yes, you can add images and a decent amount of styled text and headings above the posts listed on the category page which can be beneficial. If I want to do something fancy on those pages I use the plugin HTML in Category Descriptions, otherwise just the limited html you are anyway allowed to use in the descriptions. <br>and <a> for example.
 
Another quick update here. I continue to do exactly what @Ryuzaki suggested and things are still chugging along. Some bullets for what's happened since my last update:
  • Ahrefs hit +40K keywords
  • Content is ranking and indexing within a week at times now
  • I'm less than 100 posts away from hitting my 1k post goal
  • I started taking a closer look at KW mention, CTR, and impressions to keep optimizing old content
Fun fact, I am ranking for WAAAAAY more KWs than ahrefs is reporting. I did something kinda cool.

I did a comparison of KW <> KW looking at ahrefs data and comparing it to GSC and I've determined that I've got +10K keywords ranking within a 30-day period versus what ahrefs is displaying. Not a brag by any stretch, but I wanted to mention that GSC and Excel, Sheets, or tapping into GSC API can really be powerful if you know what to do with the data.

Have a blessed week everyone and happy hump day.

Get that money!

Cheers,
mrpotato
 
Can we sticky this thread in this section?
 
Seems like it is my turn with the kitchen sink method now.
I read this whole thread a few times to grasp all of the concepts. Now it comes down to working on the site.

The success stories are very motivating and I really hope that I can recover my site this way.
I have already spotted some things like missing alt descriptions for pictures, site speed that can most likely be improved, pobably sh*tty backlink profile. All stuff I have not learned about before that I need to tackle now.

I will keep you posted.
 
First, thank you so much for the write-up. I started the Kitchen Sink Method a few days ago and already found many improvements (unneccesary internal 301 redirects, FAQ schema, social media schema, label for forms etc) which will make a difference togehter.

4) Indexation Bloat & Quality
Do a site:yourdomain.com search on Google and note the total indexed pages there. Look in Search Console's index reports and check the total there. Do they match with your number of published posts and pages? If they're low, you have a quality problem and Google doesn't want to waste resources on your crap. If it's high, then you have a bigger problem which is also dragging down your Panda quality score. Find it and fix it. I go as far as to noindex paged archive pages that are paginated, like /category/page-2/ but always allow the first page to be indexed. Always keep them all dofollow, because the page rank will still flow.

11) Click Depth
There's not much you can do about this once your site is huge other than work on your category pages, provide sub-category archives, and show a lot more posts per category page. The more the merrier. I'll go up to 50 on mine. The point is to share the page rank around better and to help spiders encounter all of your pages.
I want to ask a question / start a discussion about the points Indexation Bloat & Quality and Click Depth. They are related to eachother when you look at the pagination.

@Ryuzaki You mention that you no-index paginated pages. On this page of the Yoast website I read the following. Could you please eleborate on this?

For a while, SEOs thought it might be a good idea to add a noindex robots meta tag to page 2 and further of a paginated archive. This would prevent people from finding page 2 and further in the search results. The idea was that the search engine would still follow all these links, so all the linked pages would still be properly indexed.

The problem is that in late 2017, Google said something that caught our attention: long-term noindex on a page will lead to them not following links on that page. More recent statements imply that if a page isn’t in their index, the links on/from it can’t be evaluated at all – their indexing of pages is tied to their processing of pages.

This makes adding noindex to page 2 and further of paginated archives a bad idea, as it might lead to your articles no longer getting the internal links they need.

My situation is as follows:
- 300 posts
- 4 categories
- 1 page with all posts (also paginated)
- 6 post on each page (which results in 30+ pages for some categories).

At the moment, all those paginated pages show up in the search results (about 100).

To tackle both Indexation Bloat & Quality and Click Depth I'm thinking about:
- Set 50 posts per page
- Remove the page with all posts. All posts have a category and because of this page all posts are shown twice (once in category and once on the page with all posts).
- Still in doubt on the no-indexing of the remaing paginated pages (discussion above).
 
@Bob_the_Builder, Yoast and everyone else jumped on that comment that John Mueller made, where he was basically cryptic and didn't provide enough context. Everyone raced to be the first to talk about it and then didn't return to edit their posts after Danny Sullivan came in and provided the truth and full context. So basically there's a lot of information out there about that comment that's completely inaccurate.

What the real deal is is that an orphaned post that is no-indexed will eventually fall out of the index and stop being discovered. It won't be linked to, it won't be in sitemaps, etc. Therefore, it won't be crawled, which means the links won't be followed by googlebot. Not because the links become nofollow, but because googlebot can't access them. Essentially his comment meant nothing new and changed nothing in the conversation.

Think about your situation in relation to an overall Index Quality Score, which Panda or some similar algorithm looks at. 25% of your posts (100 out of 400 total indexed pages) are essentially worthless. They contain duplicated excerpts and add no value. Google says it's okay to have those pages indexed (mainly because it's how Wordpress works and expecting everyone to know how to get around that isn't going to happen).

But at the same time, we know thin content is bad. If you don't think they punish for having a million thin content pages, even if they're category pages, then look at all the sites that have used 1,000 tags one time each. There are sites with 500 posts with 20,000 tag pages and get zero traffic until they delete the tags.

Google's PR (propaganda relations) people can't bring up every caveat in every conversation, and then SEO's try to weave a story out of all these no-context comments. The reality is that you don't want 25% of your indexation to be very low value pages, despite what's been said in tangential contexts.

To tackle both Indexation Bloat & Quality and Click Depth I'm thinking about:
- Set 50 posts per page
- Remove the page with all posts. All posts have a category and because of this page all posts are shown twice (once in category and once on the page with all posts).
- Still in doubt on the no-indexing of the remaing paginated pages (discussion above).
My opinion on this is, yes, set a high # of posts per paginated page. Yes, remove the extra series with "all posts". It's not needed.

The no-indexing thing is up to you, and I'm not asking you to take my word for it, but I can tell you that I've seen this kind of thing literally make or break a website. I hesitate to mention who, but there's a Youtuber who got massive funding to start a new journalism outlet and they're doing the stupid tag thing where each post gets like 5 brand new tags that never get used again. The site tanked and never came back, and no amount of funding will fix it when 75%+ of their indexation is duplicated excerpts and images of a single post, with nothing else on the page.
 
Thanks for the reply, @Ryuzaki. Makes more sense now :smile:

You are totally right that at this moment, 25% of my indexed pages are trash. I will try to get 50 posts per page, but I also have to take website speed into account. I also will delete the series with all posts.

If 50 posts per page works, the no-indexing of paginated pages also becomes less relevant.

Lets say I can get 50 posts per page, then the percentage low quality category pages is 6/306 (1,96%). When I delete the paginated pages, probably still 4/304 remain (1,32%).

So increasing the posts per page and deleting the series with all posts will probably get the percentage of trash category pages from 25% to 2%. No-indexing the few paginated pages less will not make much of a difference, I think.

Of course this will change when (speed-wise) only 25 posts per page is feasible.
 
Of course this will change when (speed-wise) only 25 posts per page is feasible.
Your speed concerns shouldn't be an issue. The database queries shouldn't run every time because you should be caching HTML versions of the pages (WP Super Cache is a good solution). You should also be lazy loading images, which is built into Wordpress now but WP Rocket's free Lazy Load plugin is a good option too. Everything else has a negligible impact on speed in such a way you could load waaay more posts per page and notice a difference if you have the rest of the stuff set up.
 
Add this to the kitchen https://www.seroundtable.com/google-nofollow-links-social-media-profiles-34645.html . Because of this article, I also noticed I had no-follow on some internal pages I thought in the past didn't matter like Terms of Service and other BS pages. I do-followed my whole site and saw instant positive reversals.
Never no-follow internal links!

A nofollow link still passes page rank, it just never ends up at the destination. It's like a broken water pipe. The water flows through and dumps out onto the ground, and there's no way to turn it off. People think the rel="nofollow" attribute is a valve that turns off the flow, but it's not. It's more like choosing to break the pipe and dump the juice onto the ground instead. It leaves but never arrives (it's wasted).

And yes, I agree that you should dofollow your sitewide links to your social media profiles, use the sameAs schema, and even this rel="me" option I'd never heard of. It's part of your branding signals, and if you don't associate them with you and even dissociate them from you by setting up a nofollow tag, then that's not only signaling distrust in your own branding, but eradicating a lot of the benefit of having those profiles in the first place. Good share.
 
Estimated Time to Recovery: 6 months
I started recovery efforts back in Sept-Oct '22. I did a lil bit in Sept, then did the full Kitchen Sink Method in Oct.

I think I got hit by the Dec updates. Some of it just seasonality. But it seems worse than usual, so I'm thinking the recent updates are impacting me. Is it common to continue to get hit by updates while you're in the 6 month recovery window?
 
I started recovery efforts back in Sept-Oct '22. I did a lil bit in Sept, then did the full Kitchen Sink Method in Oct.

I think I got hit by the Dec updates. Some of it just seasonality. But it seems worse than usual, so I'm thinking the recent updates are impacting me. Is it common to continue to get hit by updates while you're in the 6 month recovery window?
Typically, in my experience, if you get hit by a core update, you continue on that trajectory until the next one, where hopefully it goes the other way.

The reason for this is that each minor update after a core update will include refinements to that current core update. These refinements are focused on the goals of the current core update, not the next yet. So the trajectory continues or slows down. You might benefit some from the tweaks of the non-core updates happening, but rarely a full recovery until the next core update.

The best move is more improvement under the hood “audit style” while publishing and attracting links. It’s basically business-as-usual while improving all the kitchen sink items.
 
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