5 ms·

Exactly. A website like this won't just start getting a ton of search traffic overnight. It takes a lot of effort building links before the site will see any tr

Exactly. A website like this won't just start getting a ton of search traffic overnight. It takes a lot of effort building links before the site will see any traffic. This is definitely not a part-time gig.

jshen 15y ago
This is true. I run a community/blogging site for fun, not profit called yakkstr.com. There are about 50 regular users and it currently has around 5k posts. I mention it because it's a good counter example. I've done no link building, and I get very little search traffic. Maybe 50 visits per day. Occasionally someone will post about a product, instead of their relationship drama, and one girl posted about "mio liquid". That post gets about 2 hits a day from google. We can extrapolate from this, 1000 pages like this would get around 2000 hits a day and from my expeience that would earn about $1.50 a day from ads.
- getsat 15y ago
  > I've done no link building You have 1,211 backlinks. You have no meta descriptions on any of your pages. The links to your content pages (e.g., http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday) aren't inside a H1/H2 tag on your index pages. You are letting Google crawl/index your tag pages (pointless/bad). Your robots.txt isn't pointing to a sitemap. Are you using Google webmaster tools? Get rid of the /posts/N-title and just roll with /title, if possible. Set up a RSS feed and add OpenSearch. You have a lot of on-site SEO work to do. :)
  - tlrobinson 15y ago
    What resources do you recommend for learning more about SEO?
    - getsat 15y ago
      I'm by no means an expert, though I've worked with experts and picked up some stuff from them. The rest I learned from Google and various forums: http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/ http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/ http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3/faq-search-engine-optimization-182915.html http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3... Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly on your site, and getting other people to link to it. What is proposed in the OP's link is NOT impossible as the various detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it IS a lot of work. The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have 100% passive income.
      - jshen 15y ago
        I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible, but that it is a LOT of work. Becoming good at SEO and marketing, then executing a good plan, is a lot of work. My site was intended to be an example of not doing that. Doing that means trading a lot of time that could be spent learning ... I don't know, machine learning or something. Is that worth maybe 2k a month? Depends on the person. But the OP made it sound easy. It's not easy.
        getsat 15y ago
        As I stated here [1], It's definitely not easy, though I've found the only difficult part to be getting initial traffic and consistently building high quality backlinks. It's not something that can be automated, but it can be outsourced. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650
      - a5seo 15y ago
        ug, do not waste time on sitepoint, wickedfire, or the like. seobook, seomoz, seroundtable.com, distilled.co.uk, wiep.net, wolf-howl.com, rosshudgeons.com, and citationlabs are all more worthy of your time. Read The Art and Science of SEO and attend to Mozcon in June and you'll be on the right track.
    - chopsueyar 15y ago
      For some grayhat stuff, take a look over at wickedfire.com to know what other people are up to. I am not condoning such methods.
      - ReturnTheGift 15y ago
        Yup. If you plan to enter the internet-/affiliate-marketing space you'll want to keep tabs on what this crowd of folks is up to. You'll learn that this is a space inhabited by an interesting spectrum of people...from clever, helpful people displaying an inspiring amount of hustle to straight-up criminals. Also, careful clicking any links in those forums. Lots of disgusting, immature people over there.
    - webwright 15y ago
      http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors Is pure gold (there's tons more on SEOmoz).
  - jshen 15y ago
    Most of those back links are from ubuntu forums, my profile, which seems to show up on a ton of pages. They are nofollow. I think I have 2 back links that are follow, both on friends blogroll, which I believe google discounts. How much of a difference do you think those changes will make? I'm willing to do them as an experiment, except for the /title because that has caused me a lot of problems in past experiences.
    - getsat 15y ago
      It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. Some of them will definitely be an improvement. For example, it's not really valuable for someone to land on one of your tag pages. Putting all your links to your content pages inside H2 tags tells search engines that they're more important that other links on the page. The /title one is big. Google likes short URLs without a lot of extra cruft. You're using rails from what I can see, so the change is trivial. :) Add a route, throw an index on your slug field, and have requests to the old URLs do a 301 redirect to the short version. Page load time is also a SEO factor now. http://yakkstr.com/tags/7-Politics http://yakkstr.com/tags/7-Politics takes 4.25s to load according to your X-Runtime header. That's really bad. You're not paginating, and you're only loading a few entries, so I think you're missing an index. :) Here's some tips: http://madhatted.com/2009/8/12/faster-sites-done-faster http://madhatted.com/2009/8/12/faster-sites-done-faster Check this out: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com Lots of empty/valueless results. Maybe you can noindex blogs that have no posts in them so they don't pollute the search results? Your slug generator is generating bad slugs: http://yakkstr.com/posts/1793-Climate-Change--- http://yakkstr.com/posts/1793-Climate-Change--- You should look at using String#to_url from https://github.com/rubypanther/stringex https://github.com/rubypanther/stringex instead of whatever you're using currently. Google text ads may convert better than the image-based ads since they're usually more relevant to the topic at hand. Try experimenting with them.
      - jshen 15y ago
        You didn't really answer the question. I can do all of that work, how much do you think it will increase organic google traffic? 10%? 20%? This is an experiment I'm trying to do ;) My hypothesis is that these things won't make a significant difference.

jshen 15y ago

This is true. I run a community/blogging site for fun, not profit called yakkstr.com. There are about 50 regular users and it currently has around 5k posts. I mention it because it's a good counter example. I've done no link building, and I get very little search traffic. Maybe 50 visits per day. Occasionally someone will post about a product, instead of their relationship drama, and one girl posted about "mio liquid". That post gets about 2 hits a day from google. We can extrapolate from this, 1000 pages like this would get around 2000 hits a day and from my expeience that would earn about $1.50 a day from ads.

getsat 15y ago
> I've done no link building You have 1,211 backlinks. You have no meta descriptions on any of your pages. The links to your content pages (e.g., http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday http://yakkstr.com/posts/3635-Cute-Friday) aren't inside a H1/H2 tag on your index pages. You are letting Google crawl/index your tag pages (pointless/bad). Your robots.txt isn't pointing to a sitemap. Are you using Google webmaster tools? Get rid of the /posts/N-title and just roll with /title, if possible. Set up a RSS feed and add OpenSearch. You have a lot of on-site SEO work to do. :)
- tlrobinson 15y ago
  What resources do you recommend for learning more about SEO?
  - getsat 15y ago
    I'm by no means an expert, though I've worked with experts and picked up some stuff from them. The rest I learned from Google and various forums: http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo http://www.google.com/search?query=on-page+seo http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/ http://blogs.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/ http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3/faq-search-engine-optimization-182915.html http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/search-engine-optimization-3... Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly on your site, and getting other people to link to it. What is proposed in the OP's link is NOT impossible as the various detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it IS a lot of work. The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have 100% passive income.
    - jshen 15y ago
      I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible, but that it is a LOT of work. Becoming good at SEO and marketing, then executing a good plan, is a lot of work. My site was intended to be an example of not doing that. Doing that means trading a lot of time that could be spent learning ... I don't know, machine learning or something. Is that worth maybe 2k a month? Depends on the person. But the OP made it sound easy. It's not easy.
      - getsat 15y ago
        As I stated here [1], It's definitely not easy, though I've found the only difficult part to be getting initial traffic and consistently building high quality backlinks. It's not something that can be automated, but it can be outsourced. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593650
    - a5seo 15y ago
      ug, do not waste time on sitepoint, wickedfire, or the like. seobook, seomoz, seroundtable.com, distilled.co.uk, wiep.net, wolf-howl.com, rosshudgeons.com, and citationlabs are all more worthy of your time. Read The Art and Science of SEO and attend to Mozcon in June and you'll be on the right track.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    For some grayhat stuff, take a look over at wickedfire.com to know what other people are up to. I am not condoning such methods.
    - ReturnTheGift 15y ago
      Yup. If you plan to enter the internet-/affiliate-marketing space you'll want to keep tabs on what this crowd of folks is up to. You'll learn that this is a space inhabited by an interesting spectrum of people...from clever, helpful people displaying an inspiring amount of hustle to straight-up criminals. Also, careful clicking any links in those forums. Lots of disgusting, immature people over there.
  - webwright 15y ago
    http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors Is pure gold (there's tons more on SEOmoz).
- jshen 15y ago
  Most of those back links are from ubuntu forums, my profile, which seems to show up on a ton of pages. They are nofollow. I think I have 2 back links that are follow, both on friends blogroll, which I believe google discounts. How much of a difference do you think those changes will make? I'm willing to do them as an experiment, except for the /title because that has caused me a lot of problems in past experiences.
  - getsat 15y ago
    It's difficult to say exactly since SEO isn't really an exact science. Some of them will definitely be an improvement. For example, it's not really valuable for someone to land on one of your tag pages. Putting all your links to your content pages inside H2 tags tells search engines that they're more important that other links on the page. The /title one is big. Google likes short URLs without a lot of extra cruft. You're using rails from what I can see, so the change is trivial. :) Add a route, throw an index on your slug field, and have requests to the old URLs do a 301 redirect to the short version. Page load time is also a SEO factor now. http://yakkstr.com/tags/7-Politics http://yakkstr.com/tags/7-Politics takes 4.25s to load according to your X-Runtime header. That's really bad. You're not paginating, and you're only loading a few entries, so I think you're missing an index. :) Here's some tips: http://madhatted.com/2009/8/12/faster-sites-done-faster http://madhatted.com/2009/8/12/faster-sites-done-faster Check this out: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com http://www.google.com/search?q=site:yakkstr.com Lots of empty/valueless results. Maybe you can noindex blogs that have no posts in them so they don't pollute the search results? Your slug generator is generating bad slugs: http://yakkstr.com/posts/1793-Climate-Change--- http://yakkstr.com/posts/1793-Climate-Change--- You should look at using String#to_url from https://github.com/rubypanther/stringex https://github.com/rubypanther/stringex instead of whatever you're using currently. Google text ads may convert better than the image-based ads since they're usually more relevant to the topic at hand. Try experimenting with them.
    - jshen 15y ago
      You didn't really answer the question. I can do all of that work, how much do you think it will increase organic google traffic? 10%? 20%? This is an experiment I'm trying to do ;) My hypothesis is that these things won't make a significant difference.