Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'm building up a couple of sites and adding content daily. Its not just about quantity of pages in my opinion. I will go live when the site is attracting many visitors. Its about traffic.
Are you finding the website useful?
Does it answer your questions or provide a services/item you want.
There is no golden rule. You can have a website thats only 10 internal links that you find extremly useful or you can have a website with 5000 pages of garbage.
Use your best judgement.
1)I had a hard rule - at least 50 pages/articles of useful content.
2)Base it on traffic, once I sustained X number of visitors a day for at least a week (based on size of niche).
I have since changed my mind. If I were starting up a new site, I would do the following:
1)Get site infrastructure up, and after half a dozen or so pages/articles, go in and add AS ads to the site.
2)After a day or so of AS being up, and adding some more content, formally submit url to Google and other SE's. Start submitting sitemap to Google, as well as pinging Google/updating sitemap when new content is added (through a plugin in my software).
At this point I'm not getting human traffic, but I am getting SE crawler traffic, and I am getting a feel for how the site is being targeted for ads.
3)After two - four weeks or so of adding content, start working on human traffic. Because I've had a chance to see how the ads are targeting, visitors won't see bizarre non-related ads. It's possible to start getting human traffic from the search engines, but it would be low, so I would be working on backlinks.
In other words, I setup the site software/theme, add half a dozen pages, add adsense, submit to SEs, add more content, work on human traffic (inbound links), so it's almost a natural flow - by the time the human traffic from the SE's starts arriving in decent numbers, I've got content and I've got proper ad targeting.
Now if my site was incredibly niche and product driven, i.e., certain widgets of which there are 15 of, then I would put in good content for all widgets, then add AdSense while submitting my URL to the SE's. Otherwise, if it's more newsy or article driven, then refer to my steps above.
It's different, but it worked well with my last site, the three steps above, because from the time I put up AdSense and submitted to Google/Yahoo, etc., until the time I started getting properly crawled, there was a delay, and by the time I was getting properly crawled, I was adding enough new content that the spiders were having a field day, and by the time I was out of the sandbox, and human traffic from the SE's was coming in, I had quite a bit of content and proper ad targeting.
but i had to completely rewrite the content pages soon after, because all the ads were untargeted.
so, in hindsight, if i had my time again i would put the ads on straight away (or use google's cool new tool - which lets you predict the ads).
that way you will save yourself a lot of bother.
but it will still take a couple of months or so to see some profit - the earnings don't come until your traffic goes up.
that is some good advice.
Thanks, although I think photo200 almost summed up my entire post in one sentence:
immediately after design is complete and structure of the future site is clear
i had 100-or-so pages of content (plus another 10 of your normal contact/about/legal stuff etc) before i even submitted it to search engines. then i put the ads on.but i had to completely rewrite the content pages soon after, because all the ads were untargeted.
That was part of my reason to start with AS as soon as I had a half dozen or so articles, pages, etc. up. It's easier to see how the ads are targeting as I go along, rather than invest a lot of time and energy into reformatting pages/articles.
so, in hindsight, if i had my time again i would put the ads on straight away (or use google's cool new tool - which lets you predict the ads).
I'm still not sure I trust the tool fully, but I will check it next time just to see.
but it will still take a couple of months or so to see some profit - the earnings don't come until your traffic goes up.
Not to mention being properly crawled. I've seen sites go up with 100 pages of content that were not properly crawled for weeks - you'll see a few pages a day at first and then it'll snowball, and even after being properly crawled with tons of content, there is the sandbox effect.
That's why I think it's important to go ahead and at least start getting SE traffic as quickly as possible. You have a window or gap between the time you submit and first start getting crawled, and the time at which the spiders are hammering your site, might as well try to get that process going as early as possible.
There's the theory as well that if the spiders crawl your site in the early stages, and you keep adding lots of new content every day, that it helps you out SE wise. Whether that's true or not, it's hard to say.
The most important thing is to have all of your content up by the time human traffic comes in, as well as having your ads properly targeted.
I can see the validity in not adding ads until you have a lot of traffic, but some people may get turned off by what they think is an ad-free sight having advertising added overnight, or they are turned off by the inevitable non-targeted ads that will show up the first day or two or three.
5 pages of interesting content would be fine as a start for many subjects.
I'd work on getting traffic from the first day the site was online. This is Adsense were talking about, so that means no visitors, no clicks, no money.
Traffic is critical.
