This is a weird little blog/site off the edge of nowhere, and I’m sure people who stumble upon it via more recognized channels may wonder why it exists. It’s a long-term search engine optimization (SEO) project, and it’s finally taken off, after over a year of writing with long periods of neglect. Here’s our Google Analytics plot.
Woo hoo! We’re up to three visitors a day. It took a long time, too. The reason is that Google needs time to figure out if this site is a scam. Once the domain looks like it has a legitimate content, it’ll start showing it in listings.
Depending on how hard you work, it could take months to years. This blog got new content sporadically. As of today, there are only 25 posts.
The specific content you have also matters. This content is mainly just “lifehacks” with some old content ported from a personal site. Lifehacks are considered “evergreen” content – it may not get much traffic, but it’ll be relevant for a long time.*
The promotion you do also matters. No promotion was done, at all.
You should add your site to the Google Search Console tool, which includes a way to submit a sitemap to the search engine.
So, almost everything here was done wrong, yet, around August 2018, Google decided this was a legitimate site.
*The lifehacks here are not the popular kind that start with “This one trick…”. They’re more like something from the Rodale Press and start with something ecological and time consuming.
So, if you have a new website and are wondering why your articles don’t show up in Google, here you go. It’s just “SEO” – you need to give the search engines some time.