I watched an interview with Oleg Galeev about how he sold a website for $600k, and he mentioned that links started kicking in after 3 months.
Out of curiosity, I checked one of my own websites and correlated when the growth occurred.
All articles had been published back in 2020, and the website didn’t have much growth. Next, I gradually placed links on 50 of my PBNs (50 homepage links is quite a lot). I’m attaching the placement chart with the placement dates:
I didn’t place any other links to keep the experiment clean, proving the website didn’t just rank randomly.
After that, I saw steady growth starting from August 2021. About 3 months passed between the initial link placements and the growth.
Then traffic grew smoothly up to 15k per month.
And now the main point that I always emphasize and will continue to emphasize: the traffic and Google visibility of the domains you build links from are what really matter.
Take a look at my network and you will understand everything:
25 out of 50 PBNs have keyword visibility (>100 keywords) and traffic. You can see in Ahrefs how links from them performed in this specific example.
You can check out my PBNs here
FAQ
Great case study, but I see that you already had 100+ organic pages before you started placing links: https://prnt.sc/NKx7dXM-q9pT
Most pages had already been sitting there for a year with zero movement. I placed the links, and 3 months later growth kicked in.