The site dated back to 2006 but most of the early posts were slightly rewritten private label rights articles (PLR). All the posts in the last year are pretty good new and original posts.

I did a couple things to win Google back. I changed the Wordpress theme and the permanent link structure (a really bad idea). I also removed Adsense from the site. I didn’t want Google to drop my other sites.

Finally I asked what to do on a couple guru blogs. Courtney Tuttle the best suggestions. Just dump the plr articles and begin an new Ezine Articles campaign. I did both.

Copyscape Premium Batch Searches to the Rescue

I decided to use Copyscape Premium batch mode to find the real problem posts. Since the site had a lot pages I just checked the older ones. The report blew me away. I found exactly how many sites were using the same content. The right hand margin or the report showed a lot of red (really bad) some orange and yellow and little green.

I used this report to decide which older posts to delete or change to drafts. I only had a vague idea of which posts had been popular. I dropped the worst plr and article directory posts. I now have 71 posts – but 22 of them are drafts awaiting rewriting.

In May I rewrote 6 articles that I knew had been popular. I used DupeCop Desktop. to make rewriting easier. I set DupeCop snippets to 5 words so that I would catch all of the worst duplicates. I added new information the rewritten posts and most important added the following sentence: Updated May x, 2009. I save the updated posts as a brand new posts. I changed some of the titles but not all of them.

Success!

My strategy worked. Google likes most of the rewrites and the traffic is flowing again. I turned Adsense back on earlier this week. Submitting articles to Ezine Articles also helped. I had referrals again.

Other Sites

I have three other sites that used a lot of plr early on and in the last few months the page rank has slid from 5 or 6 to 3 or 4. These sites even had a bunch of nice referrals from newspapers, magazines, Facebook and related niche sites. But the plr could become a problem.

I did Copyscape batch searches for each of these sites. I also used Google Analytics to find which posts got the most page views. I made a spreadsheet for each site with columns for post title, number of page views, and number of copy cat / plr sites.

I ranked the sites by page views and decided which pages to delete or keep for rewriting based on the numbers. The more popular an article is the more important it is to schedule an update. I’ve already changed a few posts and submitted a few new articles to the directories.

It is possible to improve an older site’s traffic and get back in the search engines good graces, but it takes a bit work.

Finally, I found it’s a lot easier to rewrite and update older posts than come up with new topics.