"Reclassifying" sites

[illmasterj]

Without anything data backed, it seems fairly clear that Google weights different sites based on some sort of classification.

Low authority ecommerce sites can outrank affiliate sites on the same topic. Each update different site classifications get a boost and a pull back. At the moment, community sites are getting more airplay than usual.

We can assume that there's affiliate or display ad site classifier/s, which have had a tough time last year. In many cases, news sites are taking those rankings.

Has anyone ever followed the journey of "reclassifying" a site?

Example 1:

1. buy a pest control affiliate site that has a great brand name, great content and great backlink profile for 18x because it was hit by HCU
2. add service pages
3. remove all affiliate links, replacing them with internal links to service pages
4. add contact details, lead magnets, other things associated with B2C lead gen
5. take off-site actions like list it in directories or advertise on certain platforms
6. wait whatever period of time, at which point the site becomes reclassified as a pest control service business

Example 2:

1. buy a rock climbing discussion forum (community) that has 20 years of history, great information and a strong link profile, but few organic sessions and a user base that is evaporating for 24x
2. add ecommerce products and categories
3. change the home page to an ecommerce layout, and change the main nav to ecommerce products
4. identify the top 100 traffic generating URLs and either redirect them to ecommerce categories or use them to create great blog posts
5. find any remaining threads that get links and/or traffic and either redirect them or replace with a blog post
6. delete any remaining forum threads that don't get links or traffic, making the site 1/3 the size and higher quality
7. change all social profiles to reflect that it is now an ecommerce business that sells products
8. wait whatever period of time for the site to be reclassified as a rock climbing ecommerce store

If you know of any case studies or have first hand experience, I'd like to learn about it.

 

[bernard]

Worked for me.

Ecom -> Affiliate site

 

[harrytwatter]

Fascinating! Do you think using affiliate links on your ecommerce pages would result in affiliate reclassification?

 

[Marelli]

One aspect that remains unclear is the duration of the reclassification process.

I attempted to reclassify my site from content site into eCommerce following the HCU update around November, but it didn't yield any positive changes.

Instead, my site's traffic plummeted from 55k to 5k monthly visits, and it continues to lose keywords and rankings daily.

So I built a new eCommerce site from scratch on a fresh domain. Impressively, this new site is already outperforming the old one.

However, I'm curious what will happen when I monetize the blog section with display ads.

I am watching my niche sites closely, and none of eComm sites use ads. However, there is one Shopify POD site that was affected positively by the HCU even though it had affiliate banner on every page, but only for one company. This is a small POD site with 30 something products and only 15 articles scraping around 35k monthly visits from search.

One important thing to note is that none of the SMALL content sites in my niche (bellow 10-15k monthly visits) were hit by HCU, including my gaming niche site I use just for fun and experiments.

 

[illmasterj]

Worked for me.

Ecom -> Affiliate site

This is the opposite direction than I would have expected. Did you feel the ecom site was being held back in its rankings?

Do you think using affiliate links on your ecommerce pages would result in affiliate reclassification?

Not that I've seen. Obviously there would be some sort of tipping point, for example only 5 ecommerce products to be purchased but thousands of sponsored links site-wide. But I've seen plenty of sites that are either B2B/lead gen or ecommerce that also have affiliate links.

I built a new eCommerce site from scratch on a fresh domain. Impressively, this new site is already outperforming the old one.

I've done exactly the same. My DR5 ecom site with 10 categories, 25 products and 10 blog posts is growing very well. My DR50 affiliate site with 5+ years history in the same niche with 1,000+ URLs is in struggletown. All content is written by the same writers to similar standards. Ironically it seemed we had a sandbox years ago, now it feels like the opposite is in effect and there's an artificial boost for small/new sites.

I attempted to reclassify my site from content site into eCommerce following the HCU update around November, but it didn't yield any positive changes.

I don't have the answers, but I can't see how it can be done that quickly. Consider how long it took to lift something like an algorithmic penalty. It was always at least 1 if not 2-3 core updates. I'd guess that it will take a similar time to reclassify a site, assuming you are doing the right things.

What those right things are however, I'm still experimenting with.

 

[bernard]

This is the opposite direction than I would have expected. Did you feel the ecom site was being held back in its rankings?

It was an expired domain, so it might be different, but I would think the process was the same.

I made sure to keep url structure and so on.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Something I've seen that I've not said out loud is related to how local business sites are being pushed up the rankings like crazy. You could be in Florida getting local businesses from Minnesota and Ohio in your SERPs. Something clever that's working right now is finding a local business site with an actively maintained Google My Business and all of the local signals (so either you own one or you do a profit share) and build your 1,000 post blog out on that domain. Immediate EEAT validation to a high degree. Who knows how long it'll last, though, as things get rebalanced.

 

[Jamaica0007]

I was reading of a guy who actually made a ton of money very quickly before google cancelled his account.
Do not ask me how he did it but he managed to find local businesses on google maps (the pin drops etc) that had laid dormant for a long time or were out of business and somehow was able to modify the phone number to a phone number he controlled.

He did this hundreds of times to cities all over the place and I assume he had setup some type of low cost VOIP system that could identify to him the business the person was calling.

He would then take their details and qualify the lead before selling the lead onto a legitimate business for a few hundred dollars in whatever area the one he had commandeered was from.

According to him (I do not know him) he made about 250K in around 12 months before he woke up one morning to find his google account had been terminated.