Since I started publishing my Zettelkasten notes, I’ve noticed a large change in overall search engine traffic. My personal site and notes have doubled in impressions and clicks. Notably I receive more impressions from search engine visitors than I do from tweets from my Twitter account.
I’ve noticed some compounding effects that lead me to believe these effects will continue. As more notes are published along a wider range of topics (I’m naturally curious!), notes rank for more keywords (a very long tail), which increases impressions and clicks which further improves ranking and page authority. Even better, this content is evergreen once it’s indexed by search engines and increases in value over time. This is the exact opposite of tweets—most impressions happen in the first few hours and is unlikely to be found again because they are primarily consumed in a stream.
Links to this note
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Getting to 1,000 Clicks Per Month in Google Search
My personal site now gets 1,000 clicks per month from Google searches. It took two and half years of consistently adding content nearly every day to get to this point. There are 884 pages indexed by Google and 186 that are not (for mysterious reasons). It takes ~24k impressions to deliver 1,000 clicks. The majority of the content comes from my published notes rather than longer form content like blog posts or essays.
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Reflections on Writing 500 Notes
I’ve now written 500 notes and roughly 84,000 words since May 25, 2020 in my Zettelkasten. Here are a few thoughts and observations.
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How Long Does it Take to See SEO Results?
It takes four to six months to start seeing any results from SEO work. First you’ll see content getting indexed by Google which will result in more impressions. Next, you’ll see the site start to rank for more keywords. If all goes well, you’ll then see clicks to your website. If the site gains authority and content is actually helpful (bounce rate is sufficiently low), it will get ranked higher and drive more clicks.
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Thin Content Does Not Get Indexed by Google
Part of Google’s algorithm for indexing content is determining whether a page is useful. One heuristic for not indexing content or un-indexing it if it has already been indexed is whether or not the page is ‘thin content’. Pages that are thin have few words on the page or might be considered duplicate.
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Reflections on Writing 1000 Notes
I’ve now written 1,000 notes since May 25, 2020 in my Zettelkasten. You can see my reflections on writing 500 notes and here are my thoughts since then.
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Stock and flow is an economics concept referring to static value (stock) and transactions over a period of time (flow). This is a useful metaphor for producing content on the internet.