Corner Store Sites
Saturday, August 5th, 2006Our local corner store Southcote Newsagents is a small convenience store where you can pick up some much needed bare essentials. The store is (or rather was) run as a small family business by husband and wife team Tony and Nina who have run the store for the past 18 years. Both of them originally come from Madagascar and have worked hard since being in the UK at their small business. Go to the store and they greet you by name. See them after store hours and always willing to go for a beer. I knew them for five years and in that time I always knew them to ‘run a tight ship’ the store was always fully stocked and they always remained friendly. It came somewhat as a surprise when they announced their retirement. They had sold the shop to a family from Bangladesh. Since they have gone I have been their a few times, each time it has been strained, no more smiles or greetings, the shelves are half empty and when trying to engage them in a simple hello it is met with either a grunt or silence. The shop has gone down hill, and the locals who once went there are now going to Wal-Mart owned ASDA and ugly building with no atmosphere about 500 yards away.
Why am I writing about my local corner store you might ask? The answer lies in the fact that more and more recently I keep coming across websites in a similar position. Websites that were once thriving hives of activity and information, have now gone stagnant. Some of them have sold out to hundreds of pop-up ads, while other have been sold to owners who have done nothing with them but sit on them, possibly because they are old and aged domains which as we know are worth something these days as search engines gives older domains a little trust factor.
Established Domains & Sites
My thoughts and advice on this are simple, if you are going to buy an old established website, have the decency to at least look after it. Clean it up, let it rank as a back-up site for the one you have ranking already. As the recent past has taught us, high placements in the search engines is not guaranteed anymore. Let the other site slip and you won’t have any site ranking. Besides, you will only go onto annoy visitors who come to the site and see a mess, never to return. A post at the Text Link Ads blog by Patrick Gavin where he states:
No backup site: your site ranks #2 on page one for “widgets” for the last year, Google makes an algorithm tweak, you drop to page three where there is no traffic and no money to be made.
With backup site: your main site ranks #2 on page one for “widgets for the last year. Your backup site ranks on page two, #18 overall. Google makes a big update, your main site drops to page three and your backup site rises to #4 on page one.
That is good information and should be really taken on board. What should be mentioned as well, there is no point in having this back-up site if you are going to elt it fall into disarray or not upkeep it. Losing ranking though Google’s ALGO shift is no fault of a site owner. But losing ranking because the site has out of date information or has been ignored can only leave the owner with the blame and out of pocket.
A little spring cleaning of your website never hurt anyone, in actual fact it can only do you good by attracting new traffic and reaffirming with the current visitors.
—————————————–
Related Reading:
WARNING: No “backup site” can be hazardous to your wealth
