[staunch]

Act as if Google doesn't exist. Don't worry about SEO. Make your site something people love enough to recommend to their friends. Something they would miss if it was gone.

After 3 years, people should love the site, and a sizable number of them should be coming to it directly. The fact that it has dropped out of existence and no one cares is a powerful indicator.

Imagine if StackOverflow was deindexed tomorrow. Its traffic would drop by 90%. People would be pissed at Google for it. Then they'd start visiting the site directly, because it's that valuable to them.

If users aren't pissed that they can't find you in Google you're not providing enough value.

It looks like no one is actually searching for your site:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=cardboard+connection

http://www.google.com/trends?q=hacker+news

http://www.google.com/trends?q=stack+overflow

BTW link shorteners are frowned upon on HN. The site is: http://www.cardboardconnection.com

[mikeatl]

I didn't say it dropped out of existence by any means. There is enough of a user base and word of mouth to sustain it and I'm by no means deindexed. I don't feel that Google "owes" me anything. The content that is often times outranking me is just flat out bad and my content is much better. It feels like something I'm doing / done is causing me to rank in spite of, rather then because of, my quality content. But I haven't done anything black hat and have always focused on user experience first, SEO second.

[staunch]

Your site is the very definition of a content farm, and worse yet, it's a niche content farm. No one visits content farms intentionally, they stumble across them via searches. Google is trying to kill the incentive to create these kinds of sites.

Some of your content might be written by real authorities, but it's still lightweight and relatively thin. Compare it to Wikipedia if you want to see the standard you have to meet.

Even if you do manage to game Google again it's likely you'll get slapped down in a future tweak. It's an arms race and they're not playing around anymore.

Build something that's strong enough to stand on its own.

[mikeatl]

Wow, I'm a bit perplexed by your assertion that my site is a content farm. Could you maybe provide some specifics and/or insight into what led you to that conclusion? I appreciate your candor, but personal feelings aside, my site doesn't meet the criteria for being content farm based on Wikipedia's definition (or any other definition that I'm familiar with). And I'm not sure why you keep making the assumption that people aren't visiting my site directly as I never said that. At least half my traffic is from direct / referral sources. I also have one of the more active user forums in my niche.

My site is cited by numerous museums, libraries, and reference sites as being an authoritative source for information related to my industry. And after reading your comment I looked through Wikipedia for several hours and my site is one of the most commonly referenced and cited resources for my subject matter. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_cards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Deck_Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rookie_cards

With all that said, since we cover niche news stories the length / depth of the content is dependent on the stories themselves. For instance, if a company releases an updated checklist for one of their sets, it may only give me enough information to create a 200 word article. But since its information that is both helpful and relevant to my readers, I publish it anyway. Maybe its time to cut that portion of my business out though and double down on other types of content so that I don't have news stories pulling the rest of my site's content down.

[staunch]

I should have been a little more careful with my phrasing. Your site fits the description of a content farm. It looks and smells like one.

My reference to Wikipedia was to the quality of their articles.

I know they're not exactly the same thing, but look at these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T206_Honus_Wagner

http://www.cardboardconnection.com/baseball/t206-wagner-card...

All your content appears to be about this thin, and you have tens of thousands of pages like this. That's what a content farm looks like to me and Google.

[mikeatl]

Thank you very much for the clarification. While I don't have tens of thousands of pages like that (my site has under 10,000 pages in all and lots of those pages are very informative, rich resources), your point is well taken. It prompted me to look back over my last couple of years worth of content in a whole new light. Thus far I've deleted several hundred old news articles with no residual value, and repurposed several dozen news stories into evergreen reference articles that present lasting value to readers. And I have only gone through about 1/3 of my site's articles thus far. The end result is going to be a much better, more useful site for my readers - which is really exciting.

So thank you for your insight, and thanks to everyone else for their feedback as it has been extremely helpful.

[mikeatl]

I get about 2000 searches or so per month of people looking specifically for my brand.For my particular niche that's actually really good though. Other then the manufacturers ( and one other big site, no one has enough brand recognition to generate the searches necessary to be graphed on Google Trends.