How long to show on SERPS?

gelsi

gelsi

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Hello Everyone,

I bought a 14yr old .net domain from Godaddy, no backlinks, no traffic but is an exact match for a search term that gets 27,100 searches per month.

Wayback machine shows 2 owners. In 2010 the last owners did a single wordpress post and then did nothing more, the last snapshot of the 2010 post from Wayback was Sept 11 2017. My guess is that the domain was bought to be resold and when offered back in 2010 potential customers didn’t see value in it.

I submitted the sitemap to Google on Mar 25th it was indexed April 1 and they processed the sitemap April 10 2018. Seems odd to me that they indexed it before processing it or do they process multiple times and just show the last time it was processed?

When I go to Search Console>Search analytics it says ‘No Data’

I’ve taken 2 ‘same niche’ websites and 301’d them to the 14 yr old, search console reports 199 backlinks (April 10 2018), which is the combined number of backlinks from the 2 sites.

I set up a youtube account for the site and posted one video then got 4 friends to like it. I took 5 existing twitter accounts and added the website url to their profiles.

Can anyone tell me if I’ve missed anything and how long I need to wait for it to show in the SERPS. Thanks!
 
You don't mention doing anything on the new domain, have you built a site there? A quick way to see if any of your pages are indexed is to use "site:yourdomain.com" in Google or Bing. If nothing is indexed check that you don't have noindex set in your robots.txt or internal in your site. If WordPress there is an option in Settings > Reading called Search Engine Visibility, make sure that is not checked.
 
Hi Jeteye, thanks for your reply!
It shows when I go to site:xxx, has done for a while. But even though the domain name is an exact match to the search term it doesn't show in the serps. E.G. "Best Fast Cars" and my site is bestfastcars.net
 
Have you registered a Google Search Console account and placed the site in it?

I've ran into this many times where I buy an old domain only to find it's penalized. What happens is I slap it in Search Console, and within 48 hours or so, it pops up a manual penalty notice. Without fail, it's almost always that some spammer bought the domain and began cloaking the existing type-in traffic or search traffic. In this case, all you need to do is appeal the penalty, saying that you are a new owner, you have no clue what happened before but you've built an entirely new website on the domain. They'll lift the penalty within days usually.

The other possibility is that it's been spammed and has too many exact match anchor text links to the homepage for the same exact match phrase as the domain. It might have an over-optimization penalty, in which case you could disavow all of the bad links and wait. If you determine this is the case, I'd ask myself how serious this site is going to be. Even though the penalty may be lifted, I'm convinced there's always a little residue hanging around for quite some time, like you're not actively being whipped on the butt by Google, but you still have bruises from it.
 
Hi Ryuzaki, thanks for your reply.
My search console says no manual actions and the only backlinks going to it are the ones I've 301'd, so no spam. How long does it typically take for an exact match to start showing in the serps? Am I just being impatient? Thanks.
 
@gelsi, my apologies, you made that clear in the opening post. I read it last night and had forgotten the details.

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the two 301's and the 199 links or more probably created a big influx of page rank juice. Usually this causes a giant bounce on an already established and ranking site. It can definitely do that on a "new" site (even though its an old domain. It might have been dropped at some point and lost some age too, hard to call).

Google has a ranking transition patent that says they can ignore, randomize, or do the regular positive movements of incoming links, for up to 90 days. This usually is only triggered by a lot of page rank in my experience, but lately we've begun seeing it extend over to indexing and ranking. Even on just new pages on old sites, but for new domains in the index too.

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The above is an example of a page on my site that should have slammed into the top 3 for a term. I went hard and immediately got it to the top of a medium-sized sub-reddit, got it a wikipedia link, and those two things started getting it forum links. It started popping into the index around #5 and would disappear for a week. Repeat for a couple of months and it started popping in more frequently. Then in and out nearly daily. Finally after the 90 day mark it's settling into the top 5 permanently.

Note that it didn't start at #60 and slowly climb it's way up, which is another thing you'll see Google do. They'll set up some kind of throttle on your ability to rank and slowly make it decay till you end up where you should be.

My point is that you need to hold fast and keep working on the site. Add content, set up social media profiles and use them, etc. Or you can ignore it till it hopefully pops in where it should be. But if you start doing weird stuff that's specifically SEO related like constantly tweaking the on-page SEO, it can take longer or permanently hurt the sites ability to rank. It's their way of demoralizing spammers and catching them trying to back-engineer the algorithm.
 
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Thanks, Ryuzaki!
It's a rates website, very simple, just one page. It has a list of rates, a contact form, an accordion with 3 subheadings and one outbound link to a high authority site. And I wanted to keep it simple so people would fill in the contact form if they were curious to know more. Plus I was hoping that because it was an 'exact match' I might not need to service it with new content etc, just let it sit there and harvest the leads.
I'd love to share the address but I'm fearful of potential mischievousness.
I guess I just have to wait the 90 days..
Thanks again, I appreciate your input and always love reading your knowledgeable posts!
 
Problem is you linked to it from 5 Twitter accounts... you need at least 6 twitter accounts linking to your 1 page, 301 propped, dropped domain to rank :wink:
 
@gelsi, is there a good amount of text on the page? If not, i can imagine getting indexed but not ranking. The EMD is going to be one of tons of ranking signals. You need headers and paragraphs for basic on-page SEO signals too.
 
Hi Samwise, Thanks for your input!
EG canadaInsurancerates.com is my domain. 'Canada Insurance Rates' is searched 27,100 per month.
I have 'Canada Insurance Rates' in the title tag, the meta tag, H1 tag and 'Insurance rates' at the front of the first paragraph and in the meat of the paragraphs too. Everything on-page is closely related to 'Insurance Rates'.
I use the Yoast SEO plugin which says I got 421 words and is "over the recommended minimum of 300 words".
If I google 'site:canadainsurancerates.com' then all the pages show as they should.
However when I google 'Canada Insurance Rates' my site doesn't show up in the top 100. (I've set my google search to show 100 entries per page, you can change it in settings)
It's got to be a time thing I guess...
 
I don't know the proper way to it but starting a sentence I figured use a capital and after that a small g looked strange :smile:
 
Time is another factor you should consider. Usually, if the domain is clean, it should take less than three weeks to see some random phrases show up in the serp. Although the position might be in the hundreds.

If you're sure the domain is not blacklisted, there is this trick on adding a video sitemap and asking for a reindex, usually it shows up in serp in less than two hours.

Time is everything in this business.
 
How exactly do you mean "How long to show on SERPS?"
And where? Top 10?

Do you mean:
• Random gibberish? About a week
• Is any low competition keyword ok? About 2 months
• For a high volume high competitive keyword? Depends on how hard the keyword is.

This is assuming you're playing with non-blackhat-saturated keywords and playing with everyday small business owners. If you're going after insurance - unless you have a huge bankroll - my gosh, inpeneratable for ages!
 
Usually, on average, a website takes anywhere from two to six months to rank in SERP. But according to my experience in SEO, your website will not take more than 2 months. Try to include more competitive long tail keywords and just wait!
 
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