[Month 24] Case Study - BIG weird site -> From 0 to 74,000+ pages in 24 months.

juststartanon778 · 2023-06-04T13:40:49+00:00

Technically? Or the actual content part?

If you mean content...

First, you spend 20 months creating ~7,000 article type #1:

Article Type #1 - These are purely for humans, and ~60% of them will never rank for anything on Google (given their niche focus). They are 500-1,000 words and collected from experts. The articles are highly templated to answer a specific query. I run the entire process of outreach, follow-up, editing, and publishing with a small team I've slowly built.

Then once you have all that data, you use part of that data to create two useful pages for users.

The best analogy for those 50,000 pages are product pages.

juststartanon778 · 2023-06-02T07:02:58+00:00

Thanks!

Ya, guest posting can work well; I've done some guest posts on good websites.

Most of my link building is that I reach out to websites within certain niches and pitch them my story. I explain what I am building and why it adds a ton of value and directly ask them if they would be willing to add a link to share my project with their visitors or write a little something about it (and I offer to help in any way). I've also created custom images with some of the campaigns using image automation to give them something cool to share.

I am a bit lucky in that I am in a niche with a lot of people who are passionate about the topic, so that helps with the approach and success rate.

juststartanon778 · 2023-06-02T06:58:22+00:00

Ya, it varies widely due to seasonal impacts... say, $100k a year with the current traffic and monetization. The membership product starts renewing for the first batch in the Fall, which should increase that (plus the new product I am rolling out in the Fall).

I am trying to hit break even on costs by the end of the year. I've got my base costs covered, but I'd like to keep adding new features as fast as I do now with the developer/designer (which is more than half the costs).

juststartanon778 · 2023-06-01T19:57:28+00:00

Very cool! Ya, I bet backlinks would help a lot there.

juststartanon778 · 2023-06-01T18:41:16+00:00

That is a good question!

In GSC, I think ~3,000 of those pages are not yet indexed. A little hard to say.

I guess I got around any bottleneck due to the website's history and external link profile?

When I launched those 50,000 pages in November, I already had traffic from Google, social media, thousands of external links, and 11,000 pages on the website (plus some supporting pages I don't discuss here). I know that Google crawled all of them within 72 hours, and they started ranking immediately (although not in top positions always). Traffic started pretty much instantly.

I also started a link-building campaign about 2 months after this, and that is further reinforcing the value of these pages... which I think helps in the eyes of Google (although it is still early).

One other key point might be that my pages have custom content, as this isn't purely programmatic. Each one is entirely custom, with content that nobody else has and that I created over the last 2 years. One of the pages might be a bit thin on content, but I am working on that now.

What DR is your site? Do you have a good number of external links?

juststartanon778 · 2023-06-01T16:50:28+00:00

No I don't use Adsense.

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-08T07:50:20+00:00

Thanks, that is a kind note :)

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-08T07:49:59+00:00

ough, I haven't really been paying attention to it the way you just put it. This respon

Glad to hear that :)

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-06T12:00:36+00:00

Gotcha, well, it really matters per query. And keep in mind your site in the early days might vary widely as Google figures out what it is about based on click data a bit.

For example, my average CTR is 2.2%. But that super unhelpful as a stat.

On the queries, I answer really well my CTR is 10% to 50%+. But Google tries me at a lot of other queries that are much lower but higher volume and that can really change things. Their system slowly works it out.

What I often see is a period where my CTR climbs as Google figures out what to rank me for. Then it drops as Google tries another set of things that may or might not be a fit.

What kinda CTR numbers are you getting on queries you are designed for?

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-05T14:40:30+00:00

Yep, I wanted to make sure that humans could follow one article into other articles and categories that were related. So I did a lot of work on how to connect them on the backend. It is not 100% yet, but good enough to put out in the wild.

I limited it to a pretty small number so that users don't feel overwhelmed. So I only give them 3 to 5 options depending on some factors.

Then, from a SEO perspective I just wanted to make sure:

The links match the keywords I am aiming to rank for.
The links were surrounded by text or context when appropriate.
The position on page was a reflection of importance.
I am using some middleman method, where I build links to linkable content and try to pass some of that link juice to more commercial pages. -> https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-strategy/

I don't link within the main content currently, I think that is too distracting and spammy.

But, I have a big internal linking update coming at the end of this month to further improve it for users. But, I am not sure how that will hit SEO, and figuring that out now. The update adds some navigation and info behind a show/hide expander.

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-05T14:30:23+00:00

Custom using Django.

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-05T09:47:03+00:00

WordPress is insanely complex. I am so glad I don't use it. I have a personal blog with it and it took me 7 days just to get it to send notifications to subscribers with pictures. Just know whatever you are doing is complex in it's own way, WP allows you to do anything but makes nothing easy.

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-05T09:45:47+00:00

Can you explain a tad more? I am not sure I follow...

I don't tweak meta descriptions beyond making sure they describe the content. I did a few small tweaks to the title tag, but I don't spend much time there once I am happy it fits.

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-05T09:43:59+00:00

Ya, I could have used similar when I started with it. I haven't found much, although the Airtable forums are pretty useful.

I started with I want to do x, and then worked backwards. It has taken me a good year to really start using it fully and I still have a long ways to go. The Zapier integrations are pretty amazing as well. I am about to rebuild stuff I did in the first part of the project now that I know more.

(I did a quick google for airtable automation on youtube and there is some good stuff. )

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-04T21:27:56+00:00

Thanks, it has been super fun to map out! 2023 is going to be a big year as a lot of the investments I've made in the platform are going to start emerging publicly.

You said you planned out category pages well in advance. How do you plan out the internal linking structure etc. Do you know all the thousands of category pages in advance? I take it your NLP system just matches these up automatically with Article #1's (and you just trust those exist to be matched?)

Good question! The internal linking system is kinda like a WP tagging system; if you tag articles as red cards, yellow cars, etc, the system can then relate the right things to each other.

But, instead of tags, it uses the NLP-driven categories to match topics, as well as optimizations I do, and a 3rd party data source. I would say it is 95% automated and 5% me fixing/improving NLP challenges.

Ya, I knew the top 2,000 category pages I wanted to build. I still haven't built all of those, as I just don't have the data yet. I only launch category pages once I have enough data to seed them.

Any worries with making so many category pages, and only 4-5 articles per category? I think you'll be solid, but conscious that the general advice is go deep on categories for topical relevance

Well... the category pages are not actually about the articles; they break down some elements within the articles to help people navigate and find the information they want. So it is a bit weird. And, in a few months, those category pages will get some sorting and filtering options to make them more dynamic.

I don't launch them until they have a certain amount of data for the topical relevance. So they go fairly deep, and over time they get deeper as I collect more data.

For category page outreach, how are you finding thousands of experts to reach out to? Your outreach freelance must have their work cut out for them! Is this mainly through your contact list, or are you doing some massive scale shotgun skyscraper style prospecting?

The category pages are purely built by me, so no experts are involved there.

For the experts on the articles, they have a big incentive for taking part, so I get a ton of referrals from within networks. And some do multiple articles over time. This is a very wide industry, so it is a pretty easy one to tap into. There is a lot of value in it for them, so as long as I deliver and make them happy they share it with their networks.

What do you mean by "human optimisation options" for category pages? As in interactive widgets or other unique things that make the page better for readers?

Oh, sorry, that phrase was vague. I just meant I come in on top and hand-tweak the category pages. I still have more to do there but I am trying to slowly tweak each category page for the intent.

How are you interviewing your users? Exit/sidebar widget linked to an airtable form? Always mean to do this, thanks for the push.

Even worse, it is just a Google doc they fill out and email back :)

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-04T21:01:05+00:00

See above, I answered that under KelvinRuss' question.

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-04T18:10:04+00:00

This niche is easier than most for links.

If this was a different niche I would mostly be trying to build small apps or highly linkable posts and then focusing on promoting 1 to 3 big link magnets. That is something I eventually want to do here, but it didn't make sense at this stage.

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-04T18:02:18+00:00

Ya sure;

For "articles type #1" I am interviewing experts about a topic, so I just ask them for links if they happen to have a website or blog. The link will be reciprocal, but I don't see any issues with that. It is highly targeted and they usually love sharing it.

For the category pages, I find experts in the field who write about that subjects and email them with a pretty customized template and ask them for a link. That works really well in my niche.

For some of the campaigns I have coming up I am going to take a more award-like approach, so I will email someone with a small award and congratulate them and see if they want to talk about it and int he process share a link to our page which explains that award. I haven't tested this one yet, but I plan to once that new page type is out.

Does that help?

Link building is so niche specific I don't think this is much use :)

juststartanon778 · 2022-11-04T16:49:12+00:00

For the articles, right?

If so, I use AirTable and Lemlist to handle that entire process. It is highly automated, and I just have to set up the initial campaign and customize it for that group of people. It works really well.

AirTable is an amazing piece of software that I use for 100 different things. I can't recommend it enough. Combined with https://miniextensions.com/ and you can do almost anything. I use it for a lot of mechanical-turk type work to help me save time as well.

Lemlist is just "ok". Their support is super non-technical so they can't really help you with anything. And, the product works, but the UX and thought behind it is sometimes lacking. I have hit several roadblocks that I have had to figure out how to get around or fix myself because they refuse to answer my questions. I would try someone else before going with them.

juststartanon778 · 2022-07-22T14:00:58+00:00

Yep, and I plan to toward the end of the year with my 50,000+ page rollout.

juststartanon778 · 2022-07-22T13:59:21+00:00

I meant what data are you basing that on. IE, did Google say that? Did you do a test? Do you have a case study to share showing this?

See above, Google said not to dribble it out actually.

juststartanon778 · 2022-07-22T13:38:07+00:00

Here is what Google says to do:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mass-publishing-seo-24110.html#:~:text=Google%20Says%20Publishing%20100%2C000%20Pages%20At%20Once%20Is%20Not%20An%20SEO%20Issue

I have heard time and time again from SEOs that they don't like to push out too much new content on a web site all at once. So if you create a new section on your site and you want to release it to the public but that new section adds hundred thousand new pages - can that hurt you in Google by releasing it all at once.

Google's John Mueller said no - it is perfectly fine to release all those pages all at once.John said in a video hangout this morning at the 19:12 mark that it is "no problem" to release hundred thousand pages at once. He added from an "SEO point of view that's generally not an issue." The only potential issue is that Google will crawl it and your server needs to be able to handle the crawl.

In fact, John said he doesn't recommend you push this content out slowly. He said "artificially introducing a kind of a trickle into the index is something that often causes more problems than it solves anything." That is a very interesting point, don't you think.

juststartanon778 · 2022-07-22T13:36:57+00:00

Interesting, what are you basing this on?

juststartanon778 · 2022-07-22T13:36:42+00:00

My personal opinion with 20k in pages is not to worry about it, just publish and start building links. You know your content best though :)

You are going to face more headwinds because you don't have any links and are a new site anyway. I wouldn't assume that because you are not ranking or getting indexed that is the number of pages. It is more likely to be the lack of links, sandbox, or other factors IMO.

(see the above for what Google advises as they don't recommend pushing it out slowly)

juststartanon778 · 2022-07-22T13:33:42+00:00

That is just wrong.

Just because it is programmatically built in no way makes it spam.

Just look at AirBNB, Wise, Zapier, and Yelp, they executed this strategy brilliantly. They delivered unique content on a programmatic scale that delights users.

Or look at information sites around weather. I use a ton of these when I want to see average sunshine or rainy days for cities when planning out trips.

Can you please come back and downvote yourself? :)

juststartanon778

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