Content is the most important step, so YES! I agree you can get a good amount of traffic only with Content, but to be #1 for a strong keyword, you should do SEO too!!

I heard a story similar to yours (minus the Google penalty) in which a fellow (who was here, in fact) claimed success through content development alone.

Turns out the guy was running an encyclopedic-type website that stored hundreds of thousands of pages. It also took years to develop.

So I guess the answer is yes as long as your content is interesting enough.

That only ever happened on Field of Dreams (If you build it, he will come.).

I don't know why you seel your websites while they earn you good money even from adsense
never sell a business that earns you even small pennies online.

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This IS SEO, if you think about it, writing good quality content, with well targeted keywords is actually on page SEO and yes, it's very possible that just by publishing some very well written articles, a website can get good traffic!
But, can you imagine what doing some SEO work on your site as well might do to it? Your traffic could double, triple... you would be so much more successful if you invest some time in doing SEO work as well!

One of my sites got about 300 visits the other day from reddit. When I tried to find the link I couldn't see it..

Yeah sure but not with 300-400 word articles. Perhaps because the French market isn't so crowded but usually the longer articles rank for the majority of keywords.

It could be another reason too your articles ranked, perhaps some went viral and got shared a lot, which is a very important metric these days.

It is possible to get traffic only through the unique content, because content is a king of SEO.
Your content must be unique, fresh and user-friendly that people love to read.

Yes, I'm fully agree with you, Content is the main important factor than SEO. If you share informative and unique content on your website, then it effects positively for your website. You will get a higher traffic via only sharable and informative content creation.

What about backlinks? I mean, natural backlinks.
Did this website have links from social media, blogs, other websites?

Absolutely. Content can without a doubt draw traffic to a website. As long as it's good quality content. 300-400 word articles alone is probably not as good as throwing in at least 20% quality 1000+ word articles to appease the Google monster.

Combine that with building a list of fans and letting them know each time you post new content while occasionally offering premium content and products and you'll have yourself a profitable business. I believe everything starts from content and expands from there... so yes this is a very good business model.

Too bad you sold the site but there's no reason you can't start up another one and duplicate the process... good luck to you.

Thanks for sharing your story,
Will

You can still achieve the same result if your keywords have no competition. You may want to continue dealing on a regional market. It's pretty much easier.

No articles went viral, none of them was shared even once, besides there is no social buttons on the articles

There is no natural backlinks, only some poor quality backlinks from link exchange websites (5-10), but yes the website has a facebook page, not very active, there is no new publications in it since 2013.

Yes,quality content is everything .We can get ranked and traffic easily with unique contents.

I'm surprised that why you got penalty since you said that you do not do seo. Is there all Good content or some spam can rank? Could you pls share?

Interesting - subscribed.

moimeme do share the progress of your new blog.

Content is the most valuable aspect. As you said it was a competitive niche and as Google loves quality content; most possible your all or most articles got indexed and got into the radars of people searching on Google and finding your articles on first pages.

Content can do real better!

I am interested in knowing how was your interlinking. If you really covered some subjects extensively and you had a nice interlinking, it could be the reason.

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How could your website get penalized by Google when you are not doing any SEO?

I really want to know why your website was penalize by google since your are not using SEO do your content spam.




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It's not that easy... and there are people posting hundreds of articles a day thinking... just a few cents per article and it'll add up.... and getting nowhere.

What you did is not repeatable. You don't know why it happened, you didn't mention anything about your domain, or anything about your niche.

I can say SEO = CONTENT

Unfortunately for me my sites are getting little traffic because I don't have enough content. But you wouldn't know it from my Analytics. Referral spam has crippled my sites.

Hopefully your numbers are legit and not spam

I think the French market doesn't have that much competition if I compare with the English market, so if you focus on French articles with good content, it should work well... and also create youtube videos that can generate more traffic to your blog...

Thanks for this very useful post/query. I'm a writer and there couldn't be more promising news : )

Did you get these articles posted to the site or elsewhere for maybe offline promotion?

How did you use the content? I'm looking for more ideas on how I can utilize my writing skills to generate decent and steady income streams...and I'm in no rush, but it's important for me to know that I'm headed in the right direction.

If someone can point to useful links that answer my query in more detail, I would be truly indebted.

Cheers to fellow warriors

To better days ahead : )

Make sure your all articles would unique , if yes google love more.

Hi everyone!
Thanks for sharing your views. I am also very new at this platform. In my experience I found only unique or manual content is the appropriate key especially when you have all Google animals so active. Yes! Unique content can play a vital role in escalating any site either its using for back-linking like web 0.2 of directly for site. Thanks

If you feel you are the only one who sold a good doing website, I can tell you I did same 2 years ago. I actually never know that other people buy websites too. I though I have purchased hosting, and now I've to pay every year to renew it, and that was expensive for me at that time. SO I just bumped it. Never renewed, and it got de-listed soon from index. It was a railway information related website where so many people would come for information.

We used to run a content driven site monetised solely by Adsense. Over the course of 4 years we grew from zero income to around $6000 per month with a database of articles that had grown to around 250,000 - almost all was user generated and thus had no cost to us. For reasons unconnected with any Google updates we lost all that traffic and revenue when the Adsense team closed our account.

We rebuilt the site but we got no Google love.Content was being added automatically but direct revenues were zero. After several years, indeed just a few months ago, I noticed that we were getting significant traffic, up from almost zero to over 1000 uniques per day with over 50,000 full content pages. I sat down with my colleagues and we brainstormed how to take advantage of the situation. We reached several conclusions, the first was that we were going to, henceforth, place only content specifically written for the site, that each article would have relevant video (not YouTube rubbish) and good quality stock images.

We ran some tests and found that the new content was working for us and having an umbrella effect upon the rest of the site. So indexation was much greater, speed of indexing was down from days (if ever) to just minutes and traffic was increasing.

Emboldened by this result I asked Google if they would reopen my Adsense account - they got back to me and said they couldn't find the account and so I set up a new account using the site as the reference. Almost immediately we were approved.

We are now seeing revenues from the site but we have not done much optimisation as we are upgrading the whole platform, however we are already seeing an improvement in the quality and type of ads being displayed and this is impacting the CTR and thus revenue per visitor.

In the 'good old days' we did very little linkbuilding, concentrating upon good quality content. That worked pretty well for us, and the same intent remains - not to say that we will do nothing and over the ten years the site has been up we have a pretty strong link profile.

So, from what I know I can say that having a content driven site with little active link building can be effective but the results are not instant and the costs are not insignificant. However, although our content costs have gone up considerably it is my reckoning that the money we do not spend on link building subsidises our content costs and the content unlike most backlinks has an indefinite lifespan! However there is a big 'gotcha', the cost of content.

Our content costs are down to similar levels to those enjoyed by large content farms - but I think we have better quality content on our new style pages. The payback period is quite long given that each page has to receive several dozen clicks just to pay the costs of the content. We currently have almost 60,000 article pages. To start from scratch using our current standards would be almost impossible and expecting any real return from a micro site with only a few hundred pages is, IMHO, unrealistic.

Content is King, and we all do seo for web pages for their content. Google to rank Webpages by their content related to their keywords.

450+ articles. Definitely you did a amazing job but you failed to keep that. xD

Kind Regards.

This is a very good technique. Can you tell us how much it costed the 460 articles ???

Moimeme, actually, I am encouraged that this worked for you in 2013. We are still on a path back to where we were years ago. Early results have been encouraging.

There's several things that we learned over the years:
1) Google, in particular, hates on artificial link building - that's not to say it should not be done though.
2) Google's goal is to discover and ascribe value to content without the use of backlinks. They are trying to move away from the backlink and PageRank paradigm they invented almost 20 years ago.
3) The 'if you build it they will come' paradigm was true back in the mid oughties and is increasingly true today - as long as one can offer what people want to see.
4) If relying upon Adsense and other ad forms then one needs a HUUUUUUGE amount of content in order to have a decent chance of getting enough traffic across the site to give an economically viable output. That means that we will be investing in content on an ongoing basis and then allocating a fixed proportion of gross revenue to content creation.

In addition we are rebuilding our main site with a view to enabling good quality user generated content. We already feature curated video and images with our commissioned written content. Over the next few weeks we will be rolling out our 'Groups' functionality giving people the opportunity to set up and run their own private, public and semi-private areas within the main site where they can use our content and add their own within blogs, forums, video and audio libraries using embedded and our own resources.

The goal has to be to maximise the number of viable content pages, synergise content by re-using it across the property and reduce costs by virtue of that re-use.

The thing to remember is that with enough content that the low traffic 'long tails' will form most of the traffic, but that when that comes one will find oneself climbing up the tail. For example one might get ALL the search traffic for: fuzzy wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus. The one will start getting slightly more people searching on wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus then wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus and eventually to the high value term unicorn asparagus.

I recall that among our articles we had one about Cisco Training Certification that went viral. God knows why, the article was not exclusive to us, but after being featured on host of sites, including CNN we started to see increased traffic to all of our computer training content as we climbed the tail from long to short.

I think the whole system favors those who pay $ for advertising. The internet was not like that even as recently as 5-10 years ago.

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Content is the most important step

A lot of people, after reading such posts, will think that if they just put up 100-300 articles on their site, the sites would start receiving lot of traffic and make them good money. However I think more than the number of articles, their quality is important.

Even if you have 50 good articles which teach people something useful and which serve some purpose and stand out from hundreds of other similar articles in some way or the other, you might get decent response from your site readers. They may share your articles with others which can help in building backlinks and getting traffic to your site naturally.

So the articles have to serve some purpose and should really teach something useful from the end-user point of view. It won't be helpful in long term success if you just pay $5 a pop to get 100 odd articles written and put them all on the site.

Yes, Content is always kind for website ranking and traffic. You just need to post 2 to 3 article in a week after some month you can see amazing traffic on your site and many keyword will rank on google.