Do you know the 6 signs of blog death? Let’s say that you have a blog and you post regularly, can you spot the early warnings signs that your blog is dying? There are 6 sure fire ways to spot blog death and you need to know them before it is too late. It is far easier nurse a sick blog back to health than resurrect a dead one, so let’s look at how to tell if your blog is in it’s death throws and what you can do to breathe a little life back into it.
1. Backlinks are not growing
If your backlinks, meaning those links from other blogs or sites back to your site, aren’t growing, then you have a problem. Growing backlinks mean that other sites find your site useful and are recommending it. Backlinks are also a key component of how Google calculates Page Rank, so if you don’t continue to grow your backlinks your site will have a hard time increasing in Page Rank and climbing the search engine results pages. To check your backlinks, use this cool tool from iweb for free.
SOLUTION:
Develop a solid backlink strategy that includes commenting on other industry or local blogs, syndicating your articles on social news and network sites like ActiveRain, Digg Reddit and Real Estate Voices.
Read also: Ultimate guide to building backlinks
2. Nobody is commenting on the blog
If people aren’t commenting on your blog it’s one of two things: 1. no body is reading your blog or 2. your blog content just isn’t engaging.
SOLUTION:
Set up a plan to engage visitors by writing more call to action posts
Read also: 7 day strategy to more traffic
Read also: Blog writing 101
Also, start engaging the blogging community by commenting on other blogs to help drive their traffic back to yours.
Read also: Commenting for traffic
3. Traffic and unique visitors do not increase from month to month
Traffic and unique visits are a starting point for generating leads so you need lots and lots of focused traffic. Start by writing a lot of location and industry specific posts then ping social networks with services like pingoat or ping-o-matic. You also want to tickle syndication sites like Digg and Real Estate Voices by syndicating your posts there. Be sure to join a robust industry specific network like Active Rain as well.
Read also: Guerrilla Blogging
Read also: Plan a blog war to increase traffic
4. Google isn’t crawling your blog regularly
Most blogs have an analytics tool that will indicate search engine crawls, if you notice that Google don’t come ‘round no more… you need to worry. While Google goes through periods of deep and shallow crawls, you should see some search engine spiders visiting your site daily. If you don’t it is an indication that something about your blog is offensive to Google- it could be duplicate content, it could be validation errors, it could even be that you don’t post regularly enough.
Use RSS Pieces free Google Supressed Pages Tool to find your ommitted results fast!
SOLUTION:
Post a new article at least 3 times per week and be sure to use pingoat or ping-o-matic after each post. You also want to ping Google directly with googleping to incite it to crawl you again.
Read also: Top 5 secrets of successful blogs
5. Posts are falling out of Google’s index
Ouch. This one hurts. You should be visiting Google at least once per week and running a site:www.domainname.com on it. For example, here are RSS Pieces indexed pages. The search results it returns are all the pages you have indexed by Google. If you notice that number start to fall, instead of grow, again, get concerned. This is a very serious indication that something has gone horribly awry.
SOLUTION:
Do yourself a favor, go to the very end of your search results and click the “omitted results” link at the bottom, those are pages that Google is dropping from its primary search results. See what those pages have in common like do they all use a common word in the body, title or URL? Do your pages have more than 100 links or are they filled with RSS feeds? Are your posts copied from another post? (to see if you are copying someone else’s content on your site visit: www.copyscape.com.) In any case, find out what the common thread is and fix it.
Read also: The problem with canned content
Read Also: Are RSS feeds killing your website?
6. Nobody Diggs your articles
Do you submit your articles to Digg, but nobody digs them. Makes you feel like kind of like a loser, huh? Well, fear not, there is a plan.
SOLUTION:
Put the Digg badge on each of your posts so people that read it can easily “digg” your article. The more digs you get on articles the more authoritative a voice you will gain in the industry and the more traffic you will drive. Now, don’t be afraid to ask friends, family and the neighborhood geek to dig your article.
Read also: What Madonna can teach you about Blogging
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