So what is the driving force behind me wanting to redesign a website that used to work perfectly well? Simple - it's not working so well now, and I 'blame' the Google duplicate content filter for its demise.
Blame might not be the right word, but you get the drift. So what happened?
Well the first holiday cottages website got loads of traffic, more than the second holiday cottages website one by about 7:1, if my memory is correct. That's when they were both at their peak.
Then they both dropped off and not much happened. With the second being newer, having less traffic and therefore being a lesser risk if anything went wrong, I decided to convert it from html to php and make a few changes along the way. Basically, the intention was to make it quicker to upload (using include files for the standard code which meant 4,000 smaller files to ftp...). But at the same time I added a few small tricks that allowed me to change the descriptions and re-write a lot of them.
I put this in, sat back and waited. Along came the search engines and after a few weeks, onces all of the pages were cached, the traffic increased. In fact last month it was 5 times the first site's traffic, although still not enough!
Confident that was the problem with the second, I did attempt a minor rewrite, but never having the time it was half put in and probably made the site worse.
So a few weeks ago I started again (I've frequently pick up the site after over a week of not working on it...). My idea is to produce a site that doesn't just show the affiliate content but also has plenty of unique content and is internally linked in such a way as to provide a network of information. Hopefully, something the search engines will like and send visitors to, and something visitors will be able to make use of and want to book through...
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