Website attracting no traffic after 3 months (Sandbox?)

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I had a tutorial/report that I was offering for sale on my main website. It wasn't selling so I decided to try offering it for free through a small website (about 40 pages) with Adsense on there. This was launched on September 19 this year and almost three months later it is still not attracting any traffic. On some days I only get one or two visitors.

There is a lot of text content on there and I feel it should be attracting much more traffic. I was not expecting it to make much money but I figured that with Adsense on there I should at least get some return from the tutorial.

I thought the sandbox was no more but to all intents and purposes it looks like this is the problem. Can anyone suggest why it is attracting no traffic or anything I can check to help find the problem?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Yes I would.

[Planet13]

Was the domain name EVER registered to anyone else?

Is the site in a bad neighborhood (are there lots of bad sites hosted on the same server)?

does the site have the markings of a "legitimate" business? (Such as a physical street address, a phone number, etc.,)

and how does a site that only gets one or two visits a day get enough natural links to reach PR 4?

have you looked to see if anyone is building bad links to the site?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Was the domain name EVER registered to anyone else?

No.

Is the site in a bad neighborhood (are there lots of bad sites hosted on the same server)?

Who knows? It's hosted with Hostmonster in the USA.

does the site have the markings of a "legitimate" business? (Such as a physical street address, a phone number, etc.,)

It has similar details to most sites that I publish but in my experience there is no way that the absence of a physical address would incur a penalty. So many sites nowadays do not display an address.

and how does a site that only gets one or two visits a day get enough natural links to reach PR 4?

Probably because it has links from a couple of my other sites (on different host), which are PR5.

have you looked to see if anyone is building bad links to the site?

No evidence of this.

[mhansen]

This is an interesting thread... We built several sites in a closely related niche market last year and some of them are wild-crazy busy as planned. Others, built with a very similar set of criteria, are ghost towns, similar to what you're seeing.

What platform is your site built on? Is it plain html, or are you using a CMS like WordPress or something else?

How is your internal link structure? Are most pages within 1-2 clicks of the homepage?

How is your external link profile? Do you link out liberally and often to other authority sites within the topic?

MH

[Pjman]

@mhansen

"Are most pages within 1-2 clicks of the homepage?"

That is a very interesting point. I have a number of niche related sites. After Panda, I see the sites that have everything built within 1 click of the homepage to be very strong. 2-clicks out light on traffic. 3+ clicks are dead.

[incrediBILL]

Any social media going on?

Twitter, facebook?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

What platform is your site built on? Is it plain html, or are you using a CMS like WordPress or something else?

Plain HTML

How is your internal link structure? Are most pages within 1-2 clicks of the homepage?

Yes, as I say, this is just a small site of 30 pages all of which are just one click from the homepage.

How is your external link profile? Do you link out liberally and often to other authority sites within the topic?

No.

No social media. Is this compulsory nowadays? ;)

[mhansen]

"Are most pages within 1-2 clicks of the homepage?"

We find that reducing that making sure we keep old content alive has a great reward or us. (lowers bounce, higher pageviews per visit, etc)

Question for OP: Nobody has mentioned ads yet...

Q: Does your site have ANY ads on it since the day it was built? I am looking toward the idea that a brand new site might trip some kind of premature advertising rule. If it DOES have ads, do they get any clicks?

For the limited traffic you do get, what kind of pages-per-visit, or bounce rate does the site have?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Yes it does have ads and they get very few clicks because there is little traffic around to click them.

[incrediBILL]

No social media. Is this compulsory nowadays?

It certainly doesn't hurt, gets instant traffic, if it gets repeated gets a lot of traffic and can obviously generate organic links if people like it.

Seems the search engines like sites that have influence on the masses.

Just make sure you can handle a sudden massive surge in traffic before playing in this sometimes server-melting sandbox.

[mhansen]

Yes it does have ads

Have you considered removing all ads for 90 days? I know that ads are not the boon everyone makes them out to be, but it may be that within this specific type of site profile (informational site I assume) ads are a signal used by G* to being a lower quality site.

If they are adsense ads, I would say that is even more of a reason to remove them for a specific period of time when a site is new.

We use a 90-day rule on almost all of the sites we have ever built. We place no ads onto the site for at least 90 days after the site is 100% indexed using the site:domain.tld command.

After 90 days, we incorporate just one single ad onto the site at the very bottom of our content, and watch what happens for the next 90 days. If the site continues growing, we may add in a banner or other type of ad into the site, but rarely ever more than one single adsense block.

I'm not saying this is the same issue for you... but the timing of your original post was in the midst of MC announcing G* was using ads/placement, as a measure of quality. link: [webmasterworld.com...]

We have always felt that just the "presence of ads" was a signal of site quality used by G* in the algo.

- How new is the domain?
- Do ads exist?
- If ads exist, is privacy/doubledart covered, terms and disclosure in place?
- How many ads exist?
- What other sites does the account own?
- Are they Adsense or competitor ads?
- Where are the ads located on the page?
- How many visitors are clicking on ads?
- Are the clicks converting for the advertiser?

blah blah blah...

[edited to fix link]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Mhansen, I think you may be onto something. I am not making anything from the ads so I will remove them for a while and see what happens.

[RP_Joe]

I have some research websites with the same problem. Zero traffic. Maybe 2 google searches in 7 days. Few links.

Wordpress, popular topics. One EMD. I even moved one to another hosting service. High competition, but still, I would have expected something. No ads. They get indexed within 3 days. Maybe sooner, I don't pay close attention.

There was a time you could throw up a site, get some traffic, couple of hundred people a week. Not anymore.

Google has really killed small business websites.