I've been focused a lot on helping others with their niche sites lately. There has been some light consulting, but mostly it involves chatting with friends and helping out people in my group.

One thing everyone bemoans, including myself, is how much time things take now. Of course, if you're building niche sites on an aged domain that's pretty much a cheat code. All the same, it takes a while.

Whether you're building on an aged domain or a new one, the conventional advice is that you're not going to see much from a niche site until it is at least 6 months old. That's what some people say, not necessarily me. I'm not going to throw out an exact number because I don't think there is one.

Once you're out of the sandbox it depends.

Ah, it depends.

We knew that was coming, didn't we?

Content Age vs. Site Age vs. Domain Age

There's a big difference between these and it is the source of a lot of confusion and frustration.

Domain Age isn't where the power comes from when you get an aged domain for your niche site, not really, we know that. So let's move on.

Site Age is something people focus on too much. You can have an 18-month-old site and be frustrated with the progress and I understand that frustration. However, it's not what matters.

Content Age is the more important metric to focus on. Your content can take around 6-9 months to fully mature. What about the average content age on your site though?

Average Content Age

The average age of content on your site is a much more important metric. Your site might be 18 months old, but what does it tell you about your publishing efforts?

You might publish 30 posts in the first six months and then a further 100 posts in the following 12 months. That tells a different story when you consider how long it takes content to mature.

It doesn't matter if your site is 18 months old if the average age of your content is only 4 months. Those are the metrics you need to think about.

Signal Accumulation

It's also worth saying that it takes time to accrue a lot of signals. Whether it's trust, user signals, whatever. This is especially true for new domains.

When you're starting out your amazing article might only get crawled once every 3-6 months. The more crawls the better you will rank in a lot of cases. That's another good reason to be editing your content FYI.

Backlink Accumulation

You might think that posting 200 articles in six months means you should be getting a lot of good backlinks, especially when you're going after low-comp keywords.

Your competitor has 200 articles and it has taken them close to six years to do it. They've got loads of natural backlinks, plus their content is total shit. So why don't you?

Time. It just takes time to accrue backlinks naturally. Time/Age is a function when it comes to backlinks and you've got to be patient there.

Patience is key...

When I'm looking at people's sites there's not always a lot for me to tell them other than keep publishing. It does take a long time these days and the above are some of the important reasons why.

Hopefully, it serves as a good reminder and a little motivation that these things will compound eventually and your efforts will start to pay off.

You simply need to be patient.