Do you know the 6 signs of blog death?

There are 6 sure fire ways to spot blog death and you need to know them before it is too late.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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Posted on November 21, 2006 07:06:05

Comment from: Lola Audu [Visitor]

· http://activerain.com/blogs/auduhomes

Excellent article with great tips. Thanks for the research. I have bookmarked and will refer to this again.

Lola Audu, CRS GRI
Associate Broker
Audu Real Estate

www.auduhomes.com

Permalink January 07, 2007 20:24:15

Comment from: Jennifer Farley [Visitor]

· http://www.DigitalDesignCottage.com/

Thanks for the very informative article. It has answered a lot of questions for me, particularly about things like pinging. I've had my blog going for a few months now and am only now starting to promote it a bit. I wanted to get a batch of posts up there so that it looked like there was something to read, but I suppose I should have been pinging and commenting from day one. I'll be back to your blog for more advice. Thanks,
Jennifer

Permalink February 26, 2007 04:40:46

Comment from: Joe Ramirez [Visitor]

· http://www.mortgagemarketingideas.com

Excellent post! Great advice for blog newbies as well as a good refresher for those who have been at it for a while.

Permalink March 03, 2007 05:26:41

Comment from: John Hood-Fysh [Visitor]

· http://johhoo.topproducerblogs.com/

Greets, and thanks for the great advice and excellent material. I am sure I will be a constant viewer at your blog.
I just started my Real Estate Blog for the Oregon Mid-Willamette Valley yesterday and through Inman news found your excellent resource. That was lucky, because by reading some of your material I was able to correct some common mistakes already. :-)

Permalink March 10, 2007 19:23:14

Comment from: Keith Johnson [Visitor]

· http://greataffirmations.com

I agree with your points in this article. Also, mind you, the internet is growing incredibly fast, and there are THOUSANDS of new blogs each day, which challenge the existing ones. So, someone might have a truly great blog, and making all the right moves, however, due to the sheer "numbers" of blogs out there and the limitations that readers face due to their time on the net and ability to spend time at blogs, that will affect readership. Such is the challenge of the "Brave New World' we live in...indeed Alex Huxley was right! Regards, Keith Johnson, Author "365 Great Affirmations"

Permalink February 15, 2008 15:50:11

Comment from: Michele [Visitor]

· http://www.aflatfee.com

Thank you John for sharing your resources.

Another free tool available to determine the health of your real estate website is Google Analytics. I would like to highly suggest it to your readers who may not be using it. Google analytics will allow an individual to analyze statistics regarding landing pages, exit pages, depth of visits, location of visitors, etc.

An important Google Analytics statistic to pay attention to is the bounce rate. This is the percentage of visitors that leave your site with only a single page view. Unless all of your information is stacked on your index page, you want your visitor to access your site's features within the site. If you see an increase in your bounce rate, consider it a red flag and investigate the possible reasons why it may be occurring.

Thanks again John, your solutions are greatly appreciated.

Permalink July 19, 2008 21:06:18

Comment from: Jennifer [Visitor]

· http://www.gifttree.com/gifts-blog