At this point, I should put on a lab coat and shout, “It’s Alive! IT’S ALIVE! Hahahahaha!” Bringing stuff back from the dead will do that to you.

I’ve been working with some clients lately who have asked us to “bring back” some dead sites—sites that are not ranked for any terms in search engines and which get few visitors.

Learning Experiences

Two of these sites in particular were learning experiences. My coworkers at Sebo Marketing and I went through our typical site (re)building process—we made a list of keywords, we had a graphic designer come up with something contemporary and professional, we coded the site in standards-compliant code, we optimized our pages for search engines, and we provided plenty of what we like to call “spider food”—lots of pages with good link structure and content that spiders love.

And then we waited.

We’re still waiting, more than 6 months later.

External Links

One of the main weaknesses of these two sites is that our external linking campaigns were weak. They were the kind of sites that people wouldn’t mind visiting but weren’t likely to link to, even if you asked them nicely.

Spider Visit Frequency

Our biggest mistake by far was that we didn’t find out when search engine spiders visited the sites last. As it turns out, both sites had been dead and not visited by search engine spiders for over a year. The content hadn’t been updated and the sites had sucked for so long that the spiders haven’t been back and haven’t seen the wonderful redesign we did.

Let this be a lesson to all of you excited site renovators out there—if the site hasn’t been visited by a spider in a long time, and if an external linking campaign promises to be difficult, please proceed with caution, or at least a LOT of patience.

It may be better to start over on a new server (update the domain name to point at the new server) and get sandboxed by Google and then get out—six months in the sandbox is better than a year between spider visits!