My journey to building a massive website

I'm trying to understand what's going on right now. Traffic is down even more today, all my pages are still indexed. However, my 2 main keywords went from page 1 to page 3, but plenty of specific pages are still ranking #2. I think a lot of keyword variations have dropped in rankings and that is the biggest cause for the decline in traffic right now. Have only seen a rise in rankings since the day I started the site, so I doubt its the normal Google dance for new sites, it's definitely something they are tweaking in the algo update. Let's see if we gain any rankings in a couple of days.

I'm not in a panic, I think this is salvageable once the update is finished. However, I'm getting the second site ready, just have to fix the code a bit and populate the pages.

Carolus Rex said:

I'm trying to understand what's going on right now. Traffic is down even more today, all my pages are still indexed. However, my 2 main keywords went from page 1 to page 3, but plenty of specific pages are still ranking #2. I think a lot of keyword variations have dropped in rankings and that is the biggest cause for the decline in traffic right now. Have only seen a rise in rankings since the day I started the site, so I doubt its the normal Google dance for new sites, it's definitely something they are tweaking in the algo update. Let's see if we gain any rankings in a couple of days.

I'm not in a panic, I think this is salvageable once the update is finished. However, I'm getting the second site ready, just have to fix the code a bit and populate the pages.

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i think it is because of google new update it is effecting my website mine was in 2 position and drop to 42

Wish you the best.

Ok so I went to my GSC and completely removed any other sites I had connected that were hit in previous updates. Not that I think this will help in any sense but from now on I will have only 1 website per GSC account.

Just looked at the SERPs. For my main keyword, I'm still ranking #20-25, so while the update pushed back my rankings it's at least not getting worse, yet. I have 3 main competitors, #1 and #2 are still the same and don't seem to be affected at all. However, #3 is gone, nowhere to be found in the top 100 at least. That site was old and authoritative, but kind of spammy. They were also hit in a previous update but regained their positions after only a week or two.

Before all this I managed to get AdSense earnings to $10/day for a few days. Now with the loss in traffic I'm back to $1/day, so it's not too bad. In terms of traffic, I'm getting 50 clicks per day from Google and about 300-400/day from Yandex.

Will probably write in here daily for the duration of the update to vent and let you know what's going on. Looked through all my other sites and they seem to not be affected very much. But then again, they were all hit in a previous update so there's not much left of them anyways.

Traffic is still the same, exact same. 50 clicks per day in GSC. Went to check my indexed pages, seems they are still indexing new pages as I've gotten 30 new pages indexed since the drop in traffic. When I go to Google and search site: I see less and less pages every day, it shows 30% of what GSC actually reports as indexed which is weird. Searching for my keywords I can see my main keywords are still on page 3, but other keywords that used to rank top 5 even after the drop in traffic are now not even ranking top 100. Funny thing is, unique pages, that my competitors don't have, are ranking #1. I guess that's where my traffic is coming from mostly.

The second site is almost ready to launch but will start slow and build out the pages a few at a time. Going to hit it with foundational links and social signals, then probably try my hands at some Reddit parasite SEO tactics to bring in direct traffic. Will let you know by the end of March how that went.

Interesting. Just checked my GSC again and noticed that Google reports my rankings are back to almost normal levels (but in reality that's not the case). Hopefully this means the rankings and traffic is on the way back.

Carolus Rex said:

Do you know any better tools I can try? Might look at some tools specifically built for keyword research only.

Click to expand...

Hi,
You can check mangools.com out.
Hope you will get your rankings back soon and good luck for the journey.

I really don't know what Google is up to right now. The GSC remains unchanged, but my main keyword jumped from #30+ to #14 so there's still hope. However, one of the unique pages that kept ranking #1, yesterday I couldn't find it until I clicked "view omitted results", then it still ranked #1. But today I can't find it anywhere, as if its completely deindexed.

Wish you the best my friend

Ok here's another observation. I have a page that only me and one competitor covers, it used to bring in 10-15 clicks and 50+ impressions every day, while ranking #2. On the 8th I dropped to #11, then on the 9th it's back to #2 (exactly the same as before the update).

Now the funny thing is, I get 3 impressions and 1-2 clicks every day, why? I triple checked and I am ranking #2. There's absolutely no way people stopped searching for this term, impossible. Is there something wrong with GSC?

Wonderful journey to follow.

Wish you a good luck.

Ok just a short mid month update.

Site 1 is still flat lining at 50 clicks per day. However, it's still generating around 300 total visitors every day which earns $1-2/day. I have removed one paragraph on every page that I believe was a bit off-topic. Will just wait for the update to finish before I do any more changes to the site.

Site 2 was launched 5 days ago, it ranks most keywords on page 2-3. In the five first days I've had 15 clicks and 600 impressions. This site will be focusing only on the top 100 performing pages gathered from site 1, as I found they were bringing in 90% of the total traffic. I also won't be growing this site as quick, nor will I do any translations. Going to start with some foundational links as well as social signals, then I'm only going to buy high quality niche edits ($120-300/each) in the future.

I've updated the script and this time it works even better. Will finish the 100 pages by the end of the month. Probably won't do much more updating in March unless something changes for site 1. Will be back with an update early April.

I don't get it why we still can't get same income from G adsense itself without mediavine or rap

The google update is still on.
Wait to see !

Ok guys, it seems the site is dead and will not recover. I'll post an update next week with my plans moving forward.

Good Luck For Your Journey. Best Wishes For You.

It looked very promising, and it is a pity that Google has completely destroyed you in the update... Looking forward to hear more about your new plan, and good luck!

thank

Kikerinka said:

It looked very promising, and it is a pity that Google has completely destroyed you in the update... Looking forward to hear more about your new plan, and good luck!

Click to expand...

Yeah it sucks but what can we do. The biggest problem now is that my new site is competing with my old site for the keywords that the site is still ranking for. Thinking about removing the old site but will wait a bit longer at least.

Month 1 Update

Let's start over.

I've decided not to try and recover the old site, I will still report on it if anything changes. Even though I've worked very hard on the site, it's absolutely pointless in my view. It took just 4 months to go from 0 to basically 600 daily visitors, working on recovering the site and getting the traffic back to that level will probably take more than 4 months. So I've decided to build from scratch, I will not call this "Site 2" or anything, it's going to be the main site for this journey. If I, in the future talk about the first site I will refer to it as the old site.

With this new site, as I've mentioned, I'm going to build it slowly. Been working on an improved script and I'm happy with the new version. I had set a goal to finish the first 100 pages in March but it's just too much work with the new script. The site currently has just over 50 pages and I'm happy with that for now.

What went wrong?

As I've mentioned before, this niche is absolutely golden. There are only 3 main competitors where #1 is the biggest threat. One of the competitors has a super spammy site and has been hit in all the recent updates but for some reason always bounce back. I'm sure if I just play by the book my site too will be immune to the updates.

Analyzing my site after the March update I believe there's only one thing that could possibly have caused the hit. Seeing as the spam update focused on PAA and auto-blogging sites, it's no wonder they slapped me. In just 4 months I had 10k pages indexed, there's nothing natural about that. The quality of the content could probably be better but I always aimed to do a bit better than even my #1 competitor, so I don't think quality was an issue.

So, here's what I'm going to do with the new site:

• Build slow, maximum 150 pages the coming months. These are all the most visited pages from the old site, so they should bring in over 10k visitors after month 4.
• Work on the script to make it absolutely perfect from the start. I don't want to have to come back in a few months to adjust the script.
• Build smarter backlinks. I don't think this is what caused the algo hit, but I want to play safer this time around. Besides, I suspect one of the providers I used is now competing with me in the niche, asshole.
• Wait until 10k+ monthly traffic to join the new Mediavine Journey program. I'm not going to put up AdSense this time as there's really no point. Should be at this level of traffic in about 4 months.

In terms of backlinks I will start with foundational links and social shares. After that I'm going to buy high-quality niche edits only. When the site grows bigger I will start spending thousands of dollars on genuine outreach guest posts. Note: I will not use any provider from BHW marketplace, I'm working with one specific agency from now on. Please don't ask where I get backlinks, and no soliciting in DMs please.

Update on the old site

Unless something changes, this will probably be the last update you see about this site. I'll keep it short, here's the GSC:



As you can see, March 6th saw an all-time-high of 641 clicks, then on the 7th it crashed down to 263, and on the 8th we were down to 50. Ever since then the site has been steady between 40-50 clicks every day, with no sign of recovery at all. Now I do still rank a few keywords in the top 3 but it's simply not enough.

In March I also enabled AdSense on the site. After the hit I've been seeing about $0.50-$1.00/day. The total for the month of March is $54.66 which I'm pretty happy with considering the circumstances. Let's see if it keeps bringing in some passive money every month to help with server cost. If nothing improves I will probably deindex the site as I'm currently competing with myself on a few important keywords.

Update on the new site

Now this is the site I will keep writing about, you can forget about the previous updates as we're starting fresh from now on. I switched hosts, got a new domain name and set everything up. I'm not using the same WordPress theme, nor do I use the same plugins as the old site. The custom script is completely rewritten from the start so there's no way Google will think it's duplicated content or whatever. I also put it on a fresh Google account.

Same as before, I won't share GSC for the first month as I don't want people to see exactly which day I started. I will say it was launched after the March update started rolling out.

In March the site has gotten 6.3k impressions and 178 clicks from GSC. No earnings obviously, will wait for Mediavine.

Predictions for the future

As I've already built this site once before it should follow the same growth curve. Comparing the first month between the two sites looks like this:

Old site: 8.54k impressions and 362 clicks
New site: 6.34k impressions and 178 clicks

For the second month the old site had 2.09k clicks. While the new site is starting out slower, if it can get the same growth we could probably predict similar growth for months 3 and 4 as well.

Here's how the growth looked like on the old site (approximately)
Month 3: 5k clicks
Month 4: 10k clicks
Month 5: If the site had not been hit we would be looking at 18-20k clicks. This is an estimate based on the growth in early March and if the growth would continue as in previous months.

Will be interesting to follow up on later.

I'm also looking into parasites and will probably start doing some tests soon. Not going to write a journey about it but might talk about it from time to time here.