u/Key-Television-2424

Hey all,

In my earlier post I showed some GSC data about the effect the core update had on my site on June 27,

Almost 2 months later, August 18, I broke out with 8 clicks and almost 1k impressions,

I know its chump change in the scheme of things, but this is the first actually-positive search signal for a domain I have worked on for months and months,

Independant of bing, i'm happy with this, as well as seeing users from those high RPM zones return,

Why am I posting this?

The revenue model is primarily going to be ads, with affiliate links to be selectively layered into the highly commercial pages relating to direct travel. The reality is, you need the traffic FIRST in order to get those affiliate conversions,

Lastly, quick maths for those also looking at ad revenue,

The goal is 100 users per day ideally clicking through for 200-ish pages views on average, 200 x 30 days, is 6000 views and at a solid RPM with someone like mediavine, you can begin to bring in a small amount of cash to cover the sites expenses, hosting, domain etc.

Zero paid ads, virtually zero backlinks, no semrush, no ahrefs (scams imo). Just raw SEO.

Just wanted to show everyone what my 3.5 month old travel directory is doing. On April 21 I launched my domain with something like 300 pages and transitioned from taxonomy/categories to google query pSEO. You can see the dramatic change from the flat baseline to a gradual rise (April 21-May 8, left on the chart) to the June 24-26 update and its flatlining of my site on 27 June. My impressions dropped to 12 per day with over 700 pages and my average position at the time of the spam update hitting was 67.7.

Fast forward, you can see the recovery trend in average position. What is not visible is a few more organic clicks as per GA4.

For someone like me who's background is primarily game design and medical, this chart has taken me through a rollercoaster of emotions.

Interestingly, bing webmaster tools has been the best thing to come out of all this and is currently my best performer with its derivatives. If google ever returns, by the time I finish and hit 1k pages, I'll hopefully be well past mediavine journey application thresholds.