I recently acquired a PHP script for making article sites.
I used it to create my Home & Garden articles site.
It seems to work reasonably well, so I decided to use it for another of my sites, A Practical Guide to Computing.
It was already an article site, but consisted entirely of static pages. That made it very difficult to maintain, and being the lazy type that I am, I stopped maintaining it.
Now I am being a bit cunning about the revamp. The site already contained over 100 articles, but it didn't rank anywhere in Google, and it has fallen down the Alexa rankings to greater than 10,000,000.
So, yesterday I set up the site with just one article, and today I created a new Google Sitemap and submitted it. It's just come back with a status of OK, so I can now put my plan into action.
As I've mentioned before on this blog, Google likes sites that update regularly.
So, every day I'll reintroduce one of the old articles and update the sitemap to reflect the new page. In addition, I'll add completely new articles that I write myself from time to time.
Google should then see the site as a very active one, with a decent amount of content. Admittedly, some of that content will be duplicate (the original articles came from other article sites), but my own articles will be all new content.
It will be interesting to see how quickly this "live" site attains a Google PageRank higher than zero.
Of course, it's not just about content - Google likes to see external links to the site, so I'll work on obtaining some of them. I shall not be using link farms or reciprocal links - I want good quality one-way links.
