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.