1. Home
  2. Forums Index
  3. WebmasterWorld / Webmaster General 5:34 am May 21, 2026

Forum Moderators: phranque

Message Too Old, No Replies

I can't move the needle

new site no traffic - none - zero - zilch

         

NickMNS

2:16 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I am at total loss. I spent close to year developing a website, which I think is pretty good. It has innovative and unique content, as in I know no other sites that provide the same content. Some similar features, but I takes things one step further. Now, I am aware that I am biased and that maybe my implementation may not be appreciated by masses of users. But at this stage that line of reasoning is moot as I have for all intents and purposes been unable to attract any user at all.

I think I have all the basic on-page SEO covered and it seems that Google accepts my pages. Every time I create a new page I manually submit it to Google and it is immediately added to the index. A site: query minutes after the submission returns the page. The pages stay in the index, as I continue to see them whenever I do other site: queries. Also GSC seach analytics shows the pages showing up for impressions. But my pages are typically showing up in 40+ rank, and for a wide variety of largely coincidental search terms. That is terms that appear on the page but are not directly related to the primary topic of the content. The impressions for anyone page are far and few between.

While working on this site, I did a project partnering with someone else. I used essentially the same code for my main project and applied it to this other and completely unrelated project. I spent one month. With very little time spent on presentation and refining the concept. It is a crude site that is very basic, border line thin-content. Guess what? The traffic is slowly growing on that site. It is just a trickle, but every week I gain a few more page views.

So I must have done something wrong, what am I missing?

What are some of things that I should check?

A few specifics, I am not using .com, I am using a tld related to my niche. Some have suggested that this could be the issue. My domain name is unrelated to the niche, it is a brandable play on words that only works with the tld.

The site uses SVG to display interactive charts. Initially I had used JS to delay rendering of the graphs as they appeared below the fold, they would only render after the user scrolled. But fearing that this was causing the problems I removed it and now everything loads at once, the page load time remained reasonable.

I am using JSON-ld markup for events and reviews. So far I see the events markup used in search results but not the review but I have very few reviews (as I have no users).

There are no links pointing to my (as I have no users). I created a free wordpress.blog and made few posts and added a link, but that made no difference. I was thinking of adding a link from my main site that has pretty good traffic but the site is unrelated and ideally I would like to keep them as separate entities.

Any ideas?

keyplyr

2:31 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



So I must have done something wrong, what am I missing?
IMO unless you have something everyone wants, traffic will be a challenge in today's internet. In that case, I have learned I needed to go out and *get* the traffic, not wait for it to come to me.

Social Media sites (all of them) take time to nurture, but they are rich in potential traffic. I'm not just referring to advertising on them, you can do most of it free. Post, engage with others, created og images, twitter cards, create content that matches the topics, etc.

TorontoBoy

2:31 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I have no magic mirror to tell you the answers, but indexing and reputation does take time. You said you took a year to develop the site, how long ago did you register with Google? If your content is good, eventually other sites will reference and link to your site, and Google will pick up on this and index you higher.

There is more than Google. Did you register with Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and others? What does your log say? Does Google and Microsoft visit you every day? Do you see any 404s or 403s? I'm unsure about your TLD. Is it very uncommon?

martinibuster

2:50 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Facebook groups can be an interesting way of generating traffic and getting the ball rolling on links. On one of my sites, when it was brand new, someone posted a link from FB to an article and that seemed to get the ball rolling on natural links that I had zero to do with. Now it has an email subscriber list that is growing week after week and some pretty avid users and fans of the site.

NickMNS

3:54 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



@T.boy
but indexing and reputation does take time.

The site is essentially fully indexed and every time I created a new page it is added without any issues. As for reputation, clearly it takes time, but without traffic it will take forever.

how long ago did you register with Google?

I first created the site about a year ago, with some basic features, as test of my ability to code what I had in mind. Then in May I launched this whole new section, so in its latest form it has already been three month.

Did you register with Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and others?

No, I have done that in the past with other sites and is been completely useless. I Really believe that bing is a reactive search engine that waits to see that others have praised the content before showing it. Bingbot comes to the site, but doesn't really index much. It shows three pages for a site: query. I see the yandexbot the site is targeted to Canada and the US, so there is no point. Baidu is also there snooping.

No crawl errors at all.

The tld is
used by less than 0.1% of all the websites(source w3tech.com.)

it also shows that no high traffic sites are using the tld.

@keyplyr
IMO unless you have something everyone wants, traffic will be a challenge in today's internet

I would have agreed, but my current experience suggests otherwise. The other site I launched, is picking up steam, albeit slowly and it offers nothing special, it is a cookie cutter site, where no effort was made to be better than other similar sites. The site that gets no traffic is unique with content not provided anywhere else. So please explain?

I should also state that in my past experience with my main traffic site, I also had the impression that Google hates new and innovative stuff, it doesn't understand what it is. Regurgitate the same crap as everyone else and Google loves it. More of the same. It took a really long time to get my first site going, but I made plenty of mistakes along the way. And hopefully I have avoid them this time around.So I was hoping things would go smoother.

@keyplyr and Martinibuster
Social Media sites (all of them) take time to nurture

I have been working social media, only FB and twitter are good fits at this point. and I find it difficult to get traction with FB without a following. Anything I post goes nowhere. It is shown on my page and that is it. I have far better success with twitter but none of that success translates into traffic. It will probably take more time. But again it is frustrating, I feel I am creating plenty of content for Twitter but reap no benefits. All my Twitter posts are automatically posted on FB.

not2easy

3:55 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



It has innovative and unique content, as in I know no other sites that provide the same content.
Could be why it is slower to grow than you would like. A basic, general way of comparing it is not readily obvious. It may be relatively easy for sites with the same content and topic to be compared and thus sorted. Yours might not fit easily into a slot.

If you can think of other sites whose visitors might benefit from your information it might pay to let them know about it. Not a "hey, look at this!" kind of contact but asking if they knew this and this was available and ask if their visitors might see additional uses or ideas.

If you created a similar project that is lesser and thinner and it is just beginning to see improved traffic, it may take still longer to have a beaten path on the stronger version.

One other thing that is not at all obvious in GSC is 3 different but related areas that may surprise you.
Under Search Traffic in the left menu, see Mobile Usability.
Under Google Index, see Blocked Resources.
Under Crawl, see robots.txt Tester

The purpose is to verify that Google considers your pages to be Mobile Friendly (regardless of what their tools have told you in the past) and to see whether any important rendering resources are considered as Blocked Resources. In robots.txt check the time stamp because I had always assumed that uploading a new version made it active and that is not always true.

NickMNS

4:19 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



@not2easy
No mobile usability errors detected

No blocked resources detected

My robots.txt return a 404 because I messed with some setting in my app and never took the time to fix. I probably should get to it. But long story short, the robots.txt wasn't doing anything it simply allowed all, so unless I'm mistaken showing a 404 should have no impact.

If you can think of other sites whose visitors might benefit from your information it might pay to let them know about it. Not a "hey, look at this!" kind of contact but asking if they knew this and this was available and ask if their visitors might see additional uses or ideas.
How do you communicate with you competitor's users?

If you created a similar project that is lesser and thinner and it is just beginning to see improved traffic, it may take still longer to have a beaten path on the stronger version.

My other projects are completely unrelated to the one in question.

Back to the topic of mobile, I built the site from a mobile first perspective, all the graphics, all the content everything was designed to be accessible and readable on mobile devices.

not2easy

5:00 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I used essentially the same code for my main project and applied it to this other and completely unrelated project.

Unrelated is one thing, you seemed concerned that the encoding was unusual but the same as used on a somewhat thin and unrelated site you had set up previously with a partner. It appeared that you had some concerns about whether the unusual encoding could be part of the problem. That's what that was about. Apparently I misread your concerns.

How do you communicate with you competitor's users?
I did not suggest that you contact your competitors' users. My suggestion was to contact other sites whose visitors might benefit from the additional data you offer. If that would only be competitors it makes less sense.

tangor

5:39 am on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If picking up a more common tld isn't out of the budget (and are available!), I'd try that. That < 0.1% metric would bother the heck out of me.

If .com is out, try .net or .org and go down the tld ladder from there. If the site takes off, and you really want to brand the obscure tld as the end point, 301 will be your best friend somewhere down the road.

NickMNS

3:05 pm on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If the site takes off, and you really want to brand the obscure tld as the end point, 301 will be your best friend somewhere down the road.

Is it not possible to this from the get go, buy the .com and 301 it to the current domain? Or will I not reap the benefit of the .com?

bw3ttt

3:22 pm on Aug 14, 2017 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



You need to get backlinks. Start profiles on social media sites or sites related to your industry. Keep adding posts to your wordpress blog and link your social media profiles to the blog. You can also get paid directory links from botw.org, joeant and a few other trusted directories. Be careful which directories you choose, however. Some of them will do more harm than good. The difference between having 20 root domains linking to you and 0 domains linking to you is enormous (depending on the niche). No matter what you do you are unlikely to immediately hit your full potential. Google will nibble at your new content to see CTR, time on site and bounce rate. Whenever I start a new site, it takes about 4 months to really start getting some traffic. Even on my established sites with 100+ root domains linking to me, I do not immediately see traffic when I add new content. If I do get traffic, it is generally irrelevant or poor quality at first.

NickMNS

3:17 pm on Aug 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Much of the page content and value is in the SVG charts. I have a suspicion that Google is not indexing it despite the fact that the values of the charts are displayed as text, but text in the SVG object. The reason that I think that this information is not indexed is that when I look at the types of search terms provided in "Search Analytics" none of them relate to charts but many relate to other information that is shown on the level of the pages as the charts.

So I have decided to add tabular data to the pages in addition to SVG charts. Such that the information represented by the charts is presented in a table. I have hidden the data behind a tab but the data does appear in the code at page load. So hopefully Google will index it.

Essentially, I am being short changed by the use of SVG, since my SVG is interactive it appears on the page as <object> tags not as images, so Google doesn't index it as images in image search and since it is a graphical format it seems not to be indexed as content. Ghost content!

robzilla

4:34 pm on Aug 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Perhaps you can convert the interactive SVG files to static PNG images and use those as placeholders?

TorontoBoy

4:45 pm on Aug 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



yes, do a snapshot .png for indexing purposes.

I suspect that Google indexes static SGV [webmasters.googleblog.com] images only. Maybe you are ahead of your time.

Can you find your content on Google without using the site: parameter?

NickMNS

5:22 pm on Aug 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



@robzilla and T.boy
I have thought of it, but the issue is that I keep adding and adding, now the tables, next the PNG's. My pages were jam packed to begin with, at certain point the page will be too big and too slow.

Yes Google indexes static SVG, that is SVG that is wrapped in an image tag. So my site's logo is an SVG file, and an image search for my domain returns the logo, but none of the SVG charts appear.

@T.boy
Can you find your content on Google without using the site: parameter?

Yes, but the searches need to be specific.

One thing I have thought of doing is setting all the table tabs to visible on page load. All the tables are below the fold so user will not see them. Then when a users scrolls, I set the charts to visible. As such Googlebot sees the tables, and users see the charts. All the code is on the page, so it is not cloaking per se and users can toggle back to the table view if they wish. Win win.

TorontoBoy

6:25 pm on Aug 15, 2017 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



The image only needs to be somewhat readable from a google search. You could degrade the image down to 45%, making it lightweight, and putting it at the bottom. Google will still index it and users can still find and click on it to get to your page.
 

Join The Conversation

Moderators and Top Contributors

Hot Threads This Week

  1. Home
  2. Forums Index
  3. WebmasterWorld / Webmaster General 5:34 am May 21, 2026