Situation
Kosonga.com is a personal project — an English-language site for the animanga community. I launched it as an experiment to test how far pure on-page and technical SEO could take a new domain without any backlink building.
I started optimizing around July-August 2025. The content was mostly listicles ("best of X" articles), which were easy to produce in volume. At the time, I didn't know this content type would eventually face algorithmic headwinds.
What I found
I focused on keywords with real search demand where the existing results were mediocre. On-page optimization alone — proper headings, structured metadata, fast page load, clean internal linking — should have been enough to win rankings without any off-page signals.
What I changed
I concentrated on pure on-page and technical SEO — optimized page speed, cleaned up site architecture, structured content with proper headings and metadata, and built clean internal links between related pages. No backlinks, no guest posts, no outreach. The experiment was to see if on-page alone could produce rankings on a fresh domain.
What happened
The target keyword reached Google page 1 within the first month. Within the first year, Kosonga hit around 4,000 monthly organic clicks on Google. No backlinks were built — all of this came from pure on-page and technical SEO.
Then Google started penalizing listicle content in January 2026. Traffic fell hard. Kosonga still gets visitors, mostly from Bing and other search engines. Google traffic dropped below the peak because the site was built entirely around "best of X" articles — the exact format Google targeted.
What I'd do next
I'm planning three moves. First, remake the site around tools for animanga enthusiasts instead of relying on listicles. Blog posts will stay but shifted toward news, discussions, opinions, and reviews — content formats that don't carry the same algorithmic risk.
Second, finally build links. Outreach, guest posts on relevant anime/manga blogs, and community placements. The experiment was designed to test on-page without backlinks, so it's time to add that dimension.
Together, the overhaul, non-listicle content, and link building should rebuild trust with Google and push traffic past its previous peak.