The Gist
Thought we might share some more details on our journey together, dear reader. How are we doing? Are we visible yet?
No, not really.
But we are growing a bit.
Let’s discuss the things we’ve done, and what we plan to do next.
Can we get a foothold in public consciousness before search engines are entirely replaced by AI summaries?
Time will tell…but we certainly hope so.
If you plan to start a publication of your own, you may like this article dear reader.
Won’t you join us for a bit?
Contents
Where Are We Now?
We’re 12 days in—since publishing our first articles. We’ve authenticated our site with Google and Bing, and requested they both index them. That is to say, we have signed up for ‘search console’ and ‘webmaster tools’ to see which search results lead to us. This registers search performance, not user behaviour whilst on the site.
We also make use of Cloudflare to speed up our site, but that just tells us how many requests we get, and how many visitors.
We did not, nor will we ever, sign up for any kind of ‘analytics’. We’re just curious if we register at all on the spectrum, what our users do whilst on the site is for them, and them alone. Except when they start misbehaving on our forum perhaps, in which case we’ll say: ‘Shush. No shake hands and move on’. Not that there’s a whole lot going on over there, just we, ourselves, and us for the moment.
Back to the timeline. After about a week, there was indeed a bit of indexing…of sorts.
But what if we do a simple search on our name?
Did you mean ‘Doherty’—as it shows the results for that instead.
No, no, we didn’t Google. That would be more than a bit of a ’typo’ wouldn’t it? Although, looking at the keyboard…perhaps not entirely. G and H are indeed next to each other, as are I and O. Still, this site has been registered with search console. Verified and everything… Shouldn’t that count for something?
No, it doesn’t, Google would rather deny the existence of the site—on the off-chance that someone made a typo… That or does it perhaps have something to do with the whole favouring of ‘authoritative sites’ and most searched terms?
If that’s the case we’re in trouble as it not only displays the results of an athlete, but of an actress that has tragically departed before her time. If we indeed need to compete with famous people, we’re in for an uphill battle…
Indeed, even when we select our name it still displays the same unfortunate recommendation. But at least our listing is shown. Guess we will have to hope that enough people can find us based on our content matching their search terms then. Direct searches aren’t going to do us any favours.
We do think it’s rather unfair, though. Abuse of power if you will. The domain is registered and indexed. Yet any attempts to search for it are dissuaded. This likely holds true for all new domains, unless they have very large marketing budgets perhaps…
Bing on the other hand, does show the result, but only after nudging the visitor to a dated DVD ripping software product. Ouch. Logging into ‘Bing Webmaster Tools’ gives us an immediate warning: ‘Your website does not have enough inbound links from high-quality domains, which can negatively impact your online visibility’.
It goes on to explain that it is referring to ‘backlinks’ and how important they are. Hmm… Perhaps we should look into that then…
A quick search later and this opens up a whole can of creepy slithery things…
‘It’s essential’, ‘Google penalises it!’, ‘Not if it’s done right’, ‘Seriously, it really is essential’.
Er…okay, so which is it…and what do we do?
What Can We Do?
Well we might start with reading more about all this SEO gibberish we suppose. ‘Google likes fast sites’, ‘Mobile-first is a must’, ‘Descriptive links!’, ‘Good SEO descriptions!’, ‘Forget keywords, Google doesn’t care about those anymore!’.
We thought we took care of that quite well when cobbling this website together… Indeed, Google says we have a performance of 97% on mobile, 100% on desktop, 99% accessibility, 96% best practices, and 92% SEO.
Everything green and complaints seem relatively minor. Our ’non-indexable links’ (our menu that has CSS :target fallback), seems to be the main culprit there. But we don’t want to give that up. We want our website to keep working for the most part if a user doesn’t like to have JavaScript enabled. Search, light/dark mode, a few animations, and the contact form being the only things affected.
So, perhaps we should look into that ‘backlink’ malarkey then.
Even a brief look around that corner is more than a little confusing, and one might even say controversial. Both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools feature whole sections on backlinks… So, it does matter then, otherwise why bother developing those parts of the dashboard.
Most of our content is stuck well beyond page 2 of the search results, and legend has it that most people aren’t all that keen on clicking through many pages. So counting on the few that may have that kind of patience, and then hoping that they link to us, seems a bit far fetched. That, or perhaps, the beginnings of a new iteration of the Tortoise and the Hare story.
Organically getting those backlinks might take a while then, perhaps even too long… So where could we get them more quickly…
Well, say some bloggers and outlets: you could buy them, or ‘guest post’ on other sites. Doing a search or two on that makes us realise however, that this is where the waters get more than a little muddied… On one side there are countless agencies, promoters and evangelists… Along with a slew of strange looking sites that seem to exist entirely to display links, wrapped in half-heartedly written articles.
On the other, there are those who discuss the controversial aspects, and attempt to list legitimate guest posting opportunities. Including something called ‘Adsy’.
How about we look around for other sites first, those that are more in line with one of our own targets: the promotion of Free and Open Source?
No luck there, some of the FOSS sites claiming to wish to promote FOSS, are not open to the idea. Hmm… Why is that? Don’t want to help other publications spread the word? Or have they simply been spammed to the point of no return. Motivation-wise of course. They’re still very much alive and typing.
Perhaps we should give that Adsy thing a try then?
So we signed up.
Minimum credit charge 25 USD. Alright then. Quick look around and with the exception of someone willing to post on MSN for a whopping ‘950 USD’, we can’t seem to find any other site we’ve ever heard of before…
Okay, we can’t assume we know every major publication, so let’s give one that doesn’t look too suspicious a go… see what happens.
‘Please write a positive article about our new magazine, please include these three links’…
The result makes us feel… uneasy, and dishonest.
A bit like ‘pay to win’ at the very least. There has to be a better way, no?
Running out of options though… we could ask an LLM we suppose…
‘Hey Gemini, you sly AI you, here’s the problem… blah flippity blah…what can we do?’
…‘Well, you could buy ads on Google ads, Facebook, Twitter/X, etc…’.
Right, thanks for that… Why didn’t we think of that… That doesn’t conflict with our ethos in the most fundamental way at all. Oh wait, it does. Down to the subatomic level.
The obvious conflict with our rejection of user tracking aside, we started this magazine to raise funds for Free and Open Source development projects, not to help the continued funding of Big Tech.
Well, we suppose we’ll need to keep writing, pay close attention to Search Console and Webmaster Tools and see which of our articles get the most impressions and clicks. Then write more about those topics until we gain ’traction’. The slow and organic way.
What, you didn’t expect us to have the answer did you, dear reader? This is just the first of ‘our journey so far’ series. To be fair, it’s only been 12 days. Just thought we’d share a spot of our attempts, learning, and mental maturing.
To be continued though, oh yes, to be continued.
The Takeaway
So there we have it, dear reader. A sharing of our foray into SEO. We’re not experts on that by any means, but you likely realised that after reading this tidbit.
We’re engineers, and pseudo-philosophers. This getting noticed online thing is quite new to us, and to be honest: we’re not fans.
Perhaps there’s something useful to be had for you, or perhaps you’ll be enticed to check back on our progress. Fans or not, we will learn this gibberywhatsit. If we can master the odd IT skill, then surely we can get a grip on this, no?
Perhaps we can find out together, as we go along.
Yours,
Digerty
