Increased the domain authority of a new domain

Overview

I came across a few articles on how to get a blog post on Google's front page and I start wondering how much effort and money was necessary to make a website with a new domain rank high on search engines and how much time it would take. I choose to make a website with automatic information, like, free data given from APIs so I didn't have to feed the website writing a new post weekly or even daily. The aim to make a small effort, increase do domain authority and make it to the front page.

I never thought to make money with it because of that, after I prove my point I just let it stay there and in the future may take it down.

Step 1: Buy a domain (Ignore if you already have)

The first thing I did, and this is a very important step, was to buy a domain for my experience. The domain you choose to buy must be as "optimized" as possible to "look good" on search engines. What I mean by "look good" is that you must choose a domain that that does not look fake, spammy, etc. Try to find a domain that does not contain any dash and underscore, a domain that is easily read, and if possible a "dot com" domain. Now you must be asking "a domain like that must cost a lot of money". If you dig deep enough you will find a domain that suits you and is cheap to meet your requirements.

I found a domain reseller that was offering ".com" and others for free for a limited period of time and then I brought my domain for the total amount of 0$.

Step 2: What kind of information will the website hold?

Like I said above the data on the website came from free APIs so I didn't have to feed the website every day. I start looking for free data that I could use for free and had an API that provides access to the data.

First I found the NASA API and because I am fascinated about space I start digging and looking into the API what could I use. I decided to go with the "Astronomer picture of the day" (also known as APOD) just because I liked the content and also it had a new post every day. Applied for an API key and the next minute I had an API key that gives me access to all that information.

I thought to myself that that content alone would not be enough, so I came up with a new idea: a news aggregator based on google trends.

Google trends have an RSS with the search trends for a few countries. Made a script that reads that XML and then I used the trends keywords to look for news in other news API, gnews, that allows making 100 requests a day for free. Once again to gather all the information I needed it cost me the total amount of 0$.

Step 3: Static "dynamic" website

Instead of making a regular dynamic website, I built a "static-dynamic website" (what!).

But what is a "static-dynamic website"?

I don't think that expression exists at all. But what I wanted was to make a static website through a static site generator and built it every time the information changes.

To collect the data I used my local NAS that allows virtualization, but it can be any computer (raspPI, PC, etc). This server was responsible to collect data, build the website, and publish it to netlify.

Step 4: Traffic

The best possible traffic for your website is organic traffic (the one that comes from google searches) but to succeed in that, beyond assuring good SEO practices, you first must increase your domain authority.

For that, you must be patient because it can take some time, but are some "hacks" you can make to speed up the process.

This is the part I am least proud of. To increase your domain authority you can use traffic exchange (like rankboostup) to level up your traffic. Gives quick results but I don't advise you to overuse it. Other ways that help that is sharing a few links, articles, posts on online communities to start creating backlinks.

Money spent

Domain - 0$

Hosting - 0$

Data - 0$

Rankboostup - 0$

As you can see I've spent close to 0$ to make it to Google's front page. I say close because I use my time and personal server which comes with some electricity and other expenses but nothing substantial.

Continue

This post is becoming longer than I like so I will make a part 2 that will contain the technical explanations and describe the stack (lumen, SQLite, Jigsaw, Netlify, Debian) used in this experience. It will contain also a few code snippets and examples of how I collect the information about how I created a "static-dynamic" website.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more.