Have patience with ranking
In my time before WA, I dabbled around with a site that I made just to see if I could get traffic. No need for sales, just traffic, of the organic kind.
So I made this site chemistry-definitions.com. It was ugly, it was simple, but it ranked like crazy . . . . on Bing.
Bing (and therefore yahoo) gives me between 5 and 10 visits per day.
But nothing from google. I wasn't ranking. At all. I waited for almost two weeks, and still nothing. No ranking at all.
My pages were indexed by google, for sure, but not a single keyword I could think of would have my site come up in the results. Not even on the last page.
Beginner mistakes?
So I thought I had made a beginner mistake: Put affiliate links plainly visible on my homepage and in the sidebar on every page.
I thought google had tagged me as a lowlife affiliate thug and they had me banned. At least, that's what I thought.
Second try
So here is what I did, being uber clever and all... I created chemistry-definition.com. Notice the singular form? Clever eh?
I didn't put any commercial link on it. I used a normal template. I even put some text on the front page, although just a little bit.
I even made both sites https.
Nothing could go wrong, right?
... but the same result slapped me in the digital face. No results coming up.
Another beginner mistake
What I didn't know at the time is that google has an aversion of duplicate content.
Huh?
What?
Wait.... I copied my whole site . nothing original between these two sites I made. Site A and B were exact copies, apart from the themes. I did take care that my content was written by me, though. So no copying from other people.
That would be impolite, right?
So again no immediate ranking in big G.
Two days later
So while I see a little traffic trickling in from Bing and friends, nothing from google.
Then two days after putting site B live, suddenly site A starts ranking in Google !
Still no first page or anything close, but my site is ranking.
The moral of the story
Simply put: have a bit of patience with big G.
In my case, my site took about two weeks to start showing up in the serps. Perhaps also because it's a quick and dirty little site, with lots of keyword injections in the text.
Recent Comments
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Congrats on the progress! That's very cool! If you want, I know a merchant who could do well for you on there - edX.org has free college classes in chemistry.
Thanks!
I didn't have a clue edX even existed! Thanks for that. I'm applying already.
By the way, I just saw that indeed my domain A is doing worse, but domain B is slowly doing better ;-)
Gotta write some more articles! ;-)
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Tricks of the trade. I am having a bit of an SEO problem myself with my site. It is ranked #1 on the first page when searching for "college placement", but doesn't come up at all for "ACT Tutor". The problem is that my main business is the ACT tutoring. My entire site is filled with info on the ACT, but still no ranking for that. It's a mystery to me.
How strong is the competition on "ACT Tutor"? Consider chasing some of the longer tail keywords - the ones that are 4,5,6 or even 7 words long. There should be very little competition for those, so a well optimized site should be able to "own" them with little trouble. Once you own those, you can keep working your way up to the bigger keywords since Google knows you are a good site for that topic.
Thanks Jeannine! I will give that a try! Right now our competition is Sylvan and a variety of sites that list private tutors. We are looking to expand our business next year by adding more tutors, and I would like people to find us. Indexing on the first page will surely help our success. Thanks again!!