Getting found at all: crawling, indexing and the wait
Almost everything that looks like a ranking problem in month one is an indexing problem, or nothing at all.
This site earned 31 clicks in its first month and 39,423 in a single month later on, with no change in approach. In between, the thing that moved first was not clicks but the number of distinct queries returning impressions, which is the earliest sign that an engine understands what a page is. These guides cover how long indexing takes, how to verify it is happening, and what to check before concluding something is wrong.
The 5 guides in this topic
- Website not showing up on Google: work through this in order: The checks that actually find the cause, cheapest first, before you rewrite anything or buy anything.
- How long does Google take to index a new page?: Indexing, ranking and settling are three separate clocks. Confusing them is why people give up in week three.
- Bing is not indexing your site, and it matters more than you think: A second search engine can vanish without warning and recover on request. What that looks like, and what it costs to ignore.
- Pages are indexed but get no traffic: Indexed and invisible are the same thing from a user’s side. How to tell which of your pages are dead and which are merely unpersuasive.
- Traffic dropped suddenly: how to diagnose it without panicking: A gradual decline and a cliff have different causes and different remedies. Telling them apart is the first and cheapest step.
The evidence
The first 90 days of a new site, month by month, with the work shipped beside it: What a site with no authority actually earns in its first three months, why month one looks like failure, and the month that shipped nothing and grew 61%.