So, I’ve been doing some experimenting in getting a new domain indexed and tracking everything on a daily basis.
For background, the site is a niche jobs search (focused on clerical jobs) based off an API. The API takes care of the majority of my initial content and ongoing fresh content creation. The rest of the content I pulled and modified from Wikipedia, e.g. facts about bookkeeping jobs, and is relatively static.
Upon launch, I estimated the site had ~300K pages. My goal was for the site was to operate on autopilot, relying solely on long tail search engine traffic. To do this, I wanted to get as many pages indexed as possible.
Here are the daily indexing results you can benchmark against.
- Day 1 - 2 pages indexed
- Day 2 - 31 pages indexed
- Day 3 - 92 pages indexed
- Day 4 - 129 pages indexed
- Day 5 - 361 pages indexed
- Day 6 - 3,340 pages indexed
- Day 7 - some fluctuation between 3,340 and ~3,800 pages indexed
- Day 8 - 3,960 pages indexed w/ some fluctuations during the day
- Day 9 - 6,510 pages indexed
- Day 10 - 8,080 pages indexed
- Day 11 - 10,100 pages indexed
- Day 12 - 11,000 pages indexed
- Day 13 - Forgot to check stats. I noticed that 80% of the traffic was from long tail search traffic, where my site is ranked on page 1 for all the the referring search terms. Here is a screenshot from Google Analytics for the week of 4/17 (http://themanwhosoldtheweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/casestudy_googleanalytics1.gif).
- Day 14 - 17,000 pages indexed
- Day 15 - Fluctuations between 16,000 - 17,000 pages indexed
- Day 16 - 19,900 pages indexed
- Day 17 - 19,800 pages indexed
- Day 18 - 21,300 pages indexed
- Day 19 - 21,300 pages indexed
- Day 20 - 22,100 pages indexed
- Day 21 - 22,700 pages indexed; for week of 2/24, received 150 visitors and 233 page views
By day 21, I did a fairly detailed analysis of all my daily stats and compiled the results into a guide called 21K in 21 Days. Here’s a direct download to the PDF file (so no opt-in):
- Day 22 - 23,000 pages indexed
- Day 23 - 23,900 pages indexed
- Day 24 - 24,600 pages indexed; slapped on some Google Adsense ads, so will begin to monetize this site now
- Day 25 - 24,600 pages indexed
- Day 26 - 22,400 pages indexed
- Day 27 - 22,500 pages indexed
- Day 28 - 22,400 pages indexed; for week of 5/1, received 138 visitors and 394 page views; made $7.37 across Indeed and Adsense (almost recouped my initial $7.50 GoDaddy domain investment after only 1 week of monetization!)
Since the indexing results was plateauing, going forward, I started doing weekly updates tracking indexing results, web traffic, and earnings. Keep in mind, even before tracking the earnings, my site started to earn from through the Indeed publisher program.
- Days 28-34
[LIST] - 21,900 pages indexed
- 150 visits, 391 pageviews (78% US), 84 keyword searches
- $8.40 earnings
[/LIST]
- Days 35-41
[LIST] - 22,800 pages indexed
- 194 visits, 480 pageviews (72% US), 79 keyword searches
- $3.23 earnings
[/LIST]
- Days 42-48
[LIST] - 47,500 pages indexed
- 227 visits, 629 pageviews (63% US), 111 keyword searches
- $11.79 earnings
[/LIST]
- Days 49-55
[LIST] - 56,900 pages indexed
- 394 visits, 1,045 pageviews (70% US), 240 keyword searches
- $124.08 earnings (mostly from direct ad sales)
[/LIST]
Feel free to reply with any questions. Don’t PM.
In case you’re wondering, this case study is still ongoing. I am tracking it on my blog here:
themanwhosoldtheweb.com/blog/2011/04/live-case-study-build-300000-page-autoscale-autopilot-site
Hope you find the results so far interesting and informative!
Dave