How fast can you rank on page one of Google?

In a recent post on how to rank higher in Google I talked about getting to the #1 spot, with an ‘authority site’ – it was a site Google knows well, has been around years, has tons of backlinks etc. At least that’s what I think authority site means.

Recently this Wordpress blog – NomadPhilippines, that isn’t an authority site for anything – got on the first page for ‘best country in Asia to live‘.

At the time it was only a few weeks old, had 70 posts up, 10 or so backlinks mostly from forums / blog comments so not that valuable, and zero social shares.

monthly-searches-keyword

We were looking for keywords for article ideas and thought ok I’ll target ‘best country in Asia to live‘ even though apparently it only gets 50 searches (but I’ve read those figures are underestimated a bit). We put together a sequence of five articles.

ranked-first-page-of-googleEach of the first four at some point has the phrase ‘best country in Asia to live in‘ once.

Then the last is actually titled ‘Best country in Asia to Live‘ and also has that in the URL, first and last paragraph, and a H2 subheader.

All five posts interlink to each other.

Then all five have that term as a tag, so https://www.nomadphilippines.com/tag/best-country-in-asia-to-live/ is an archive page.

I have no idea what I’m doing really but this seemed intelligent at the time.

That was about it, then I pinged the site, apparently WordPress does this for you automatically, I like to do it anyway though, kind of an OCD thing.

Didn’t share on social media yet or build any links, so no backlinks.

I opened Google in an incognito window (otherwise it ranks sites you’ve visited yourself higher in search) and saw it was on the first page of Google within three hours.

Took the screenshot shown right 16 hours after, to write this post.

Both the main post and the archive page rank, so hopefully that means more clicks.

I also checked the rank on SEOCentro in case that still wasn’t accurate, it said 18th.

Anyway that is quite promising for a new site that isn’t narrowly focused on Asia.

seocentro

Authority sites like Forbes, Quora, Wikipedia, Bloomberg, and BusinessInsider were lower ranked for that specific longtail keyword.

We did the same thing with ‘Filipina girlfriend asking for money‘, write a post about that, a few related posts, link them all together and make a tag archive page with the same name. That also went onto the first page of Google.

7-place-in-google

For that one the archive page ranks higher than the post with that title.

I’ve read that sometimes Google ranks new fresh content higher to ‘give it a chance’ in a sense. I’ll check back later to see if it’s dropped in ranking.

5 Responses

  1. kick2dante says:

    cliffs = google knows quality when it sees it

  2. Skins says:

    Whenever I read about SEO I want to take a nap.

  3. kick2dante says:

    ya i do apologize for that guys

  4. jspill says:

    That reminds me I wrote some stuff about freelance writing on Skins’ site http://singlemansparadise.com/playing-online-poker-in-thailand/

    Lots of animated .gifs over there to keep one awake 🙂

  5. kick2dante says:

    you should have seen the future and worked a https://www.nomadphilippines.com link in…… what a fail

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