How long does it actually take to rank on Google and earn decent revenue from a page?
Example 1. Article published in late August – decent income after 3 months. Domain in Google’s top rankings.
Factors that could have influenced the rapid growth:
- Built PBN links almost immediately.
- Large volume of content, no less than competitors.
- Text is optimized for keywords, with high density for main keywords.
- Most importantly, the site was already ranking in Google and responding with traffic to new content. With a new domain or a drop domain, it definitely wouldn’t have happened that fast.
- Topical relevance. Articles were published within the site’s niche. That is, a site about vacuum cleaners featured an article on cleaning vacuum cleaners, not cleaning microwaves.
The optimal strategy for me right now is to pick a domain whose pages are already in the top results and only then populate it heavily with content to get faster returns.
The site was also under an E-A-T filter because it is partly medical-related. As you can see, all queries dropped out of the top 3. It’s only starting to recover now. I have a theory that the drop of queries from the top 3 is connected to the E-A-T update in Google.
Example 2. New drop domain and content. Traffic started coming after 3 months – the drop worked for a single article.
The drop was purchased and indexed on March 26, 2019 (Yes, I track everything I do meticulously).
As a rule, keyword visibility occurs within 2 weeks of launching. If there’s no keyword visibility after a month, that’s not a great sign. For some reason, Google doesn’t see the site and isn’t placing it in the top 100 for any keywords.
Here, one informational article made it into the top. Others are still weak, but the momentum has started and the site is moving, which isn’t bad.
Right now, I don’t check drop domains for any filters or traffic. I just get powerful links and wait to see if it takes off. According to Ahrefs, this drop domain never had any traffic, but that didn’t stop it from reaching the top.
Example 3. Article published on December 20, decent traffic started in March. Once again, a 3-month activation period.
This article doesn’t convert as well, I’m not really sure why. But traffic is flowing, and sales occasionally come through.
Example 4. The site hasn’t firmly gotten on its feet yet. I will wait. The drop domain was launched on March 25.
Despite the domain having prior traffic, that hasn’t helped it secure solid top rankings yet. But I will wait. The trend is positive—roughly 3 months from launch. Of course, I could try boosting the site and pages with backlinks.
AdSense ban, or why posts are rare or not coming out at all
I had a site network targeting foreign markets built for AdSense. Recently, AdSense rules changed, and my network—which looked like a network due to templated sites—got banned. Traffic dropped to 12k per day. Moreover, besides being excluded from AdSense, the sites were de-indexed/banned. Not a single site outside the AdSense panel was affected. This all happened in early June.
The rules changed, and I needed to adapt to them. I failed to do so even though the sites provided value and answered user queries, but visually resembled PBN/satellite sites. For now, I have no desire to build anything for AdSense or deal with them. Moderators now manually review every site.
I redirected the sites to new domains via 301 redirects. Recovery will take 3-6 months.
Hence the search for new income streams right now and hard work ahead.