New Site - Articles Stopped Getting Indexed

larcha

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Hey All,

I started a new site on 10/13, added 92 articles between 1000-3000 words since. First month looked fairly normal for what I would expect in terms of impressions/clicks, however, the articles all dropped out of Google in the last two weeks. My entire process is very similar (just a different niche) from my last site which I grew to 180k sessions/month in only 1 year (new domain).

Even though I understand how this all works, it is a little discouraging seeing my articles fall out of the SERPs for this long..

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Any idea what I should do here? Just keep publishing? I want to get to around 150-200 articles before year-end. The goal is to have this site monetized with Mediavine by the end of Summer 2023.

I have received 4 DA 50+ links from HARO as well.

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Thanks,
Charlie
 
Yeah, you know what the answer to this is. The website is a month old. It's way too early to call it quits, especially with Google being garbage since May (?) or so.
 
Yeah, you know what the answer to this is. The website is a month old. It's way too early to call it quits, especially with Google being garbage since May (?) or so.
Fair. I'm so tempted to send more quality links and get things moving. Each day I'm not indexed hurts. Curious if anyone has noticed something similar for a newer site.
 
Fair. I'm so tempted to send more quality links and get things moving. Each day I'm not indexed hurts. Curious if anyone has noticed something similar for a newer site.
100%. It's not links, it's simply time. Google needs more time now than ever to understand what new sites are about.
 
Fair. I'm so tempted to send more quality links and get things moving.
This isn't a bad idea - it'll all help down the road and will help with the eventual sale of the website. Not to mention, you'll be able to scare off competitors with a higher DA/DR.
 
It’s nothing to do with a new site.

My 10 year old site lost almost all traffic in May. Pages were no longer indexed.

Then Sept 25/26 about 75% of everything came back.

Then on Nov 23 last week same drop as in May.
Absolute garbage GOOGLE!
 
@mcfarlanek, would you mind, if you have time, adding your story to this thread? If you could include a graph showing the traffic tanking twice with traffic amounts included, and even the organic pages part overlaid on the same graph (from Ahrefs), that would rule. I'm also interested in the number of published posts, the DR score, and anything else you could add. The more info we can see, the more a pattern might emerge. Hearing that you recovered and then tanked again really sucks to hear, for you and all of us hoping for a return to normalcy. Google has really screwed the pooch since May.
 
It’s nothing to do with a new site.

My 10 year old site lost almost all traffic in May. Pages were no longer indexed.

Then Sept 25/26 about 75% of everything came back.

Then on Nov 23 last week same drop as in May.
Absolute garbage GOOGLE!
I also experienced a drop of over 90%, 21-23 november i dropped like crazy.
But I think I figured out what happened, Thanksgiving happened!!! ( could this be a thing @Ryuzaki? )

My content is probably not so valuable around Thanksgiving and that was why I saw a huge drop, it is getting back up now.

I was going to post this in my thread on my monthly report but didnt want to leave you hanging discouraged.
 
Update:

Frustrated to report that this site is still having no luck. I was able to use some indexers to help successfully index my articles but not a single one ranks. Very confused here. Site is now 3 months old.

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What type of marketing are you doing for the site, besides SEO? I'm curious to what sources of other traffic do you have or are working on.
 
What type of marketing are you doing for the site, besides SEO? I'm curious to what sources of other traffic do you have or are working on.
Nothing else (as I normally have done with my previous exits for content sites). Plan was to hit 500 articles before I spend time on social media platforms like Pinterest, Facebook & Twitter.
 
Nothing else (as I normally have done with my previous exits for content sites). Plan was to hit 500 articles before I spend time on social media platforms like Pinterest, Facebook & Twitter.
Why would Google waste resources indexing and ranking a site that nobody links to or shares on social media?

I mentioned this in the main thread about indexing, but I believe that with the web growing exponentially Google is deciding to not bother indexing more content. Only when they do significant updates would they then consider new pages for inclusion into the index (unless they are getting traffic, internal / external links, shares). Even within the index I don't think they consider all pages for ranking, because the compute is wasted.

For nearly every commercially viable keyword there are a 1000 reasonable URLs that could rank on the first page if content quality was the only consideration. Let's just use a hypothetical example:

For a keyword, Google is already seeing that user metrics on the SERP are solid. People seem to be finding what they are looking for, regardless of intent and geography, because they include 1 news site, 3 information, 3 ecommerce, 1 video, 1 Q&A site and a SERP feature. They've messed around with it a bunch over the past few months of updates and the user metrics are pretty consistent.

Why would they then waste a bunch of resources indexing and running all the algorithms again to re-rank a bunch of pages? Because the crawler stumbled across your new article? The odds are that your pages are nearly identical content to what's already ranking, so why even bother. Plus, no traffic goes to your page, barely anybody links to it and certainly the velocity of those links is probably 0 now. So, why bother indexing and ranking it?

Wait enough time and you might "magically" get considered for indexing and ranking when a large enough update reconsiders more pages. Otherwise, you need to do something to make your website worth indexing and ranking. Driving traffic from social and building links is a good start. To do those two consistently, your content probably also needs to offer something special beyond what already exists and is ranking.
 
Why would Google waste resources indexing and ranking a site that nobody links to or shares on social media?

I mentioned this in the main thread about indexing, but I believe that with the web growing exponentially Google is deciding to not bother indexing more content. Only when they do significant updates would they then consider new pages for inclusion into the index (unless they are getting traffic, internal / external links, shares). Even within the index I don't think they consider all pages for ranking, because the compute is wasted.

For nearly every commercially viable keyword there are a 1000 reasonable URLs that could rank on the first page if content quality was the only consideration. Let's just use a hypothetical example:

For a keyword, Google is already seeing that user metrics on the SERP are solid. People seem to be finding what they are looking for, regardless of intent and geography, because they include 1 news site, 3 information, 3 ecommerce, 1 video, 1 Q&A site and a SERP feature. They've messed around with it a bunch over the past few months of updates and the user metrics are pretty consistent.

Why would they then waste a bunch of resources indexing and running all the algorithms again to re-rank a bunch of pages? Because the crawler stumbled across your new article? The odds are that your pages are nearly identical content to what's already ranking, so why even bother. Plus, no traffic goes to your page, barely anybody links to it and certainly the velocity of those links is probably 0 now. So, why bother indexing and ranking it?

Wait enough time and you might "magically" get considered for indexing and ranking when a large enough update reconsiders more pages. Otherwise, you need to do something to make your website worth indexing and ranking. Driving traffic from social and building links is a good start. To do those two consistently, your content probably also needs to offer something special beyond what already exists and is ranking.
Well this is the motivation I needed. Starting another link building and social media brand awareness campaign today. Much appreciated.
 
Nothing else (as I normally have done with my previous exits for content sites). Plan was to hit 500 articles before I spend time on social media platforms like Pinterest, Facebook & Twitter.

I dunno man, it feels like everyone that is losing is using a 2007 playbook model.

Google owns Chrome.

Google has the 8.8.8.8 DNS service where several internet nodes uses as a resource to resolve website IP addresses.

Those 2 things along can show Google what websites are getting traffic and what is worth indexing and what is a waste of time.

If an unknown website starts getting traffic from Reddit, Chrome and the DNS service immediately tells them, "hey, who the fuck is this?"

Immediately.

So if you, a business, are not getting traffic from additional source, at the bare minimum 100 visitors a month, I mean, why would Google bother indexing your site without a waiting period?

When brand new sites go viral on Reddit they magically get indexed within minutes. Not rocket surgery here.

Get additional traffic, and stop with the lazy, "social media" as the only way. There are 1,000,000 websites in the top ranking websites on the internet - NONE of them are pointing to you are sending you traffic? So why should Google?

It's not 2007.
 
Well this is the motivation I needed. Starting another link building and social media brand awareness campaign today. Much appreciated.
At the very least, consider answering some questions on Quora (sharing a link to an article naturally when relevant) and creating some forum profiles to comment on threads with.

You should also create some social media profiles to help strengthen the "brand" too. Just repurpose the blog articles into bite-sized content for Instagram carousals and Twitter threads.

You don't have to go "crazy" if you'd prefer to still primarily focus on blog content, but sharing links to blog posts at the bottom of Twitter threads, for example, is a good way to link to your blog content while still publishing legitimate content to social media.
 
You need to drive real traffic to those inner pages/domain through paid and/or social ads, email campaigns, real life flyers, social campaigns, or any type of traffic leak you can think of.

You should have been promoting your website, content, offers, and/or products on day 1.
 
How is this site doing now? Any update? How long did it take to get your pages up, getting impressions and ranking? :smile:
 
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