This is month #8 of our SEO case study.
Last month we published almost the entire month, doing around 670 articles.
We also published a few days in June to bring the total article count up to around 2,250.
This project is now considered completed.
May 2023 Stats
Views were up to 112,000, a bump of nearly 20% from last month.
Traffic held mostly steady for a month before finally reaching a new level.
Indexing
The impressions bump comes from one article.
It didn’t result in any extra clicks, and Google began filtering it out again.
Indexing picked up a bit, but it still doesn’t index most of the articles.
Bing Search Console
Being is currently giving the site more than 50K impressions and close to 2K clicks per day.
The rest of the traffic is from Bing-like search engines like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.
Monetization: Rejected from Mediavine, AdThrive, and Newor Media
As for the site monetization, we were rejected from Mediavine, AdThrive (now known as Raptive), and Newor Media.
AdThrive didn’t communicate anything. Just a generic rejection email.
Newor Media said they’d accept the site and we had signed a contract, but Google denied the site, citing “thin content.”
There are over 2,200 articles on the sites and over 5 million words, but bots will be bots.
We did not like Ezoic as we covered in last month’s article.
Sticking With Adsense
So we are sticking with Adsense, where we’re getting a $5-$7 page RPM.
So, in the end, it looks like we’ll just passively run Adsense on this site.
Will This Site Ever Get Out of the Google Sandbox?
It’s been 8 months and we have no signs of life on Google. Just breadcrumbs in terms of impressions.
Perhaps it’s a filter, and perhaps the domain won’t work.
We’ll have a professional SEO look at it in a few months if it’s still dead in terms of Google.
Going Forward
New projects on the way.
We’ll add only a few posts to this site going forward to keep it active.
And without a premium ad network or traction on Google, we’ll need to direct the resources into other projects.
Was This Project A Success?
By doing all this work, we are at least somewhere out there on the spectrum of traffic and revenue, so from that vantage point it was a success.
It, however, hasn’t hit what you might call a baseline expectation.
With 2,250 posts and an expectation of getting around 200 PVs per month per article, that would be 450K in views.
With a premium ad network, that would be $25 RPM or so, or around $11K per month.
Instead, we’re looking at maybe $20 per day or around $600 per month, given Google isn’t delivering traffic and we’re stuck with Adsense.
We don’t know what the right solution will be to get it there.
Is it combining this domain with another one?
It is something about the domain’s faulty communication with the search engine?
This is a subject to explore down the road.
