Great website, great articles, poor ranking... What's wrong ?

Hi, first off I want to thank everyone here for the awesome posts and amount of knowledge I learnt thanks to this community!

I've been lurking and reading A LOT of your stories before even thinking about posting my experience. I'm not sure I saw someone in my situation with the same outcome, so if you did, please feel free to point me to the post you're thinking about.

I started a new website 2 months ago that I'm trying to monetize through classic affiliate marketing (shareasale, etc.). I'm gonna try to sum up the main steps of my process to get to the point quickly:

Step #1 - Set up the website

I followed every possible method BY THE BOOK to get a super clean, optimized website. Basically what I did :

• Did my research of a 'not so' competitive niche through hours of research on SEMRush
• Checked available affiliate programs in the niche I chose, to look for acceptable commissions.
• Produced my content strategy linking keywords to article topics, and searched for the corresponding semantics for every article.
• Hired content writers on Upwork to produce quality, 1,500-word long articles. Checked them, optimized them again and again.
• Bought an expired domain that I chose mostly because of its age (WayBack Machine showed there was content in 2004 there).
• Set up and customized the website on Webflow, which is IMHO currently the best platform to get an optimized website.

I'm sure everything is not perfect, but these are my Pagespeed results measured by GTMetrix:
Thanks to the attention I put in my articles, these are the results I got in my Search Console (I posted the articles at the end of April) :

Step #2 - Backlinks!

The domain I bought had 10 backlinks listed in SEMRush and a few more in Ahrefs, so I knew I needed to work a lot on that point.

I did TONS of research on how to create quality backlinks for that kind of website, from shitty Fiverr backlinks, to super-expensive-but-very-efficient (or so they say) sponsored articles. I ended up using the following method:

• I wrote four 1,500-word articles matching my niche and products, with a lot of contextual keywords in each of them.
• I used WordAI to create a highly original spintax for each article, and created 1,000 spuns out of them, keeping the appropriate keywords.
• I created 50 Web 2.0 properties and posted one spun of each article on each property (so 4 articles per property x 50 properties = 200 links), that I optimized with high authority links, a Youtube video and one picture per article.

I created 200 backlinks that I started indexing slowly through an indexing service, and I intend on using a Multi-Tier backlink strategy after that, pushing my Web 2.0 articles with non-contextual backlinks.


Step #3 - So... What's next ?

So there we are, with a great website, 10 great articles, a few good rankings (one of my articles reached position #10 on a keyword with a decent search volume), but... no real result for now.

My average position on Google is 66.4 and I'm really far on the keywords I'm targeting.

I must say, I don't know what to do from now on to get more traffic and rank higher, so I'm asking you guys your opinion on that...
What do you think should be the next step ?

I considered a lot of things from creating a good amount of backlinks through GSA SER, to creating my something close to a PBN (buy expired domains > set up wordpress > generate massive amount of content from translated articles).... But I can't make up my mind and it drives me crazy not to find the solution :/

I'm thinking about creating new backlinks, but I don't want to look suspicious to Google...
Also thinking about writing new articles, but can't see what that would do given my current articles are already well optimized.
Should I create more backlinks ? What kind ?
Should I wait for the Web 2.0 backlinks to kick in before moving on to a new action ?
Am I being too impatient ?

Please feel free to drop your comments. Thank you so much!

no idea what to tell you since the experiences are so mixed in today's SEO environment (some people rank top 3 within one week with brand new domain just by posting spun content, while others rank after 6 months with quality content like yours... if they are lucky).

However, based on your description, what I would do is 3 things....

1. continue posting quality content of 1000 to 2000 worlds long (not under 1000 words long!) BUT on very low competition keywords which, most often than not are also long tail keywords (7-8 words long). Even if those keywords get 0 traffic per month, try to write at least 1-2 articles per week around such keywords for a few months. I know it's downletting putting so much effort into "meaningless" keywords but I've heard people getting increased rankings because of such keywords. The more keywords (even if they have no traffic) that a new website ranks for the better the rankings will be later on. So, do this, content-wise!

2. continue acquiring backlinks but, if you can afford, only focus on backlinks from websites with lots of RDs, high DA (40+ but 80+ if you can) and which also get decent traffic from google on a weekly basis

3. speaking of traffic.... last year I purchased FAKE traffic for one of my websites for $5 off Fiverr and 3-4 days into the campaign my rankings have started improving. But, the fake traffic that I purchased on Fiverr has been very good, basically hard to tell by google if it's been fake or legit because it's come from very user-friendly websites like reddit, quora, active forums, social media, etc. But the seller that gave me this traffic (a Dutch girl) has treated me miserably, she had only started my campaign after 2 weeks of me urging her to start the campaign and only after I threatened to cancel order and leave shitty review.

Anyway, after 1 month my campaign had come to an end and 1 week or so after that the rankings have started decreasing.... or rather, get back to their initial position, which has been somewhere on page 6 of google. During the time that my campaign had run a couple of (low volume) keywords have gotten to position #11 (so, page 2 of google) from page 6, which has been pretty good to be honest, and I can say for sure that the rankings have increased because of the traffic as I had not built a single backlink to the site until that point.

So, if google had not patched up this thing yet, and if you can find serious seller who can give you "quality" fake traffic (LOL), you might want to buy 5-6 months worth of such traffic and see if you notice any rankings improvement. I can't guarantee that it will work because it depends on a lot of things, but you can try if you're willing to take this risk. If not, quality content + strong backlinks should do the trick most of the time (and no, web 2.0s are not strong backlinks).

Your website is 2 months old, you've gotten 5 clicks from Google so far (I'm guessing you haven't gotten much more from social media or other websites either) and you've built 200 links from 50 web 2.0 in that time. So each of your previous visitors would have to have set up 5 to 10 web 2.0s to write exactly 4 articles there, all linking to your site.

How stupid do you think Google is in 2021? You couldn't have made the link building more obvious.

I don't know if there is anything left to save your site. But if there is, then I would definitely concentrate on a massive expansion of the content and postpone the link building until you really have a few visitors. And then it's a matter of building some good, strong links, and very slowly, so that it looks natural.

OLS_ said:

Your website is 2 months old, you've gotten 5 clicks...

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Wow, thanks for being positive and kind dude, always a pleasure.

So what should have I done then ? Wait for visitors to appear magically ? Save your energy and move on to another post next time.

tazarbm said:

no idea what to tell you since the experiences are so mixed in today's SEO environment (some people rank top 3 within one week with brand new domain just by posting spun content, while others rank after 6 months with quality content like yours... if they are lucky).

However, based on your description, what I would do is 3 things....

1. continue posting quality content of 1000 to 2000 worlds long (not under 1000 words long!) BUT on very low competition keywords which, most often than not are also long tail keywords (7-8 words long). Even if those keywords get 0 traffic per month, try to write at least 1-2 articles per week around such keywords for a few months. I know it's downletting putting so much effort into "meaningless" keywords but I've heard people getting increased rankings because of such keywords. The more keywords (even if they have no traffic) that a new website ranks for the better the rankings will be later on. So, do this, content-wise!

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Now that's interesting! Definitely gonna try that, thanks @tazarbm

Klaxton said:

Now that's interesting! Definitely gonna try that, thanks @tazarbm

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No problem... and good luck

Google usually has a 6 months sandbox period where they won't rank sites to see if they are legit websites or churn & burn projects. Your may also witness a fall of traffic during this period. You should also publish content for low competition keywords (a lot of them) to get out of comfort zone that kills most websites on the internet. If you reach 100 unique visitors per day, then you can consider your website to be a successful venture and think about improving it further. Until then, keep posting content.

Klaxton said:

Wow, thanks for being positive and kind dude, always a pleasure.

So what should have I done then ? Wait for visitors to appear magically ? Save your energy and move on to another post next time.

Click to expand...

You might not like the manner in which he said it, but hes not wrong. He's actually trying to save you months of hard work because you messed up the initial setup. I have had tons of people laugh in my face while telling me the most important advice I have ever received.

My advice to you is to start a new site as well and continue to work on this one. Start the second one out more slowly and less obvious. SEO takes a long time to see results. You might work on your first site for another 6 months to a year before you realize its not going to work. You could have a second site already making gains in that time.

If you want to see results in 2 months, your keywords have to be low comp. You can easily get traffic in 2 months if your keyword research is good.

The fact that your not getting traffic means that your keywords aren’t very easy and they may need time + links to rank.

The links you made aren’t really going to help or harm your site. They’re most probably going to be ignored.

Find some low comp keywords and write 2-300 words of content for them. You’ll get the traffic you want. You don’t need thousands of words to get traffic.

swjedinight said:

You might not like the manner in which he said it, but hes not wrong. He's actually trying to save you months of hard work because you messed up the initial setup. I have had tons of people laugh in my face while telling me the most important advice I have ever received.

My advice to you is to start a new site as well and continue to work on this one. Start the second one out more slowly and less obvious. SEO takes a long time to see results. You might work on your first site for another 6 months to a year before you realize its not going to work. You could have a second site already making gains in that time.

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Thanks for the comment, the idea of a "backup" project is actually a good one as well.

I get that I might have done things too quickly, but some websites in my niche have that kind of backlinks profile, where they accelerated all of a sudden with success:


This website is a steady Top 3 on very competitive keywords, mostly with Web 2.0 backlinks. So I hear that I might be too bullish on backlinks with my strategy, but those results make you wonder if this is not a good way to proceed after all

10 articles? thats your issue right there. You'll need more content to be viewed as an authority. Either that or some banging back links that arent web 2.0's. More content will probably cost less.

Get more content up an let it sit for a few months while building links steadily.

WorkingNow said:

10 articles? thats your issue right there. You'll need more content to be viewed as an authority. Either that or some banging back links that arent web 2.0's. More content will probably cost less.

Get more content up an let it sit for a few months while building links steadily.

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this

@Klaxton - one thing to be careful of: do not create competing pages for a keyword. if you, google will have a hard time figuring which page to rank, and most likely will never give you the number 1 position.

a page about benefits of red apple and a page about where to buy the best red apple are fine. don't create competing pages against these 2 for red apples.