I launched a brand-new website yesterday and decided to document what happens when you start with structure first, not individual articles.
This is Day 0 of an experiment to see how a topical authority–driven publishing strategy performs on a fresh domain.
No ads.
No backlinks.
No existing authority.
Just content, structure, and time.
Context
- Launch date: January 11, 2026
- Site age: Brand new
- Competition: High (the topic is dominated by established SEO platforms)
- Indexing: noindex removed on Day 0
What the site launched with
On day one, the site went live with:
- 1 root hub page
- 1 complete topical pillar
- ~25 supporting articles, planned and published together
- Core SEO metadata on all public pages (meta tags, OG tags, schema)
- A fully defined internal linking structure (no isolated articles)
All content was published at once, not gradually.
Content architecture
The structure is intentional and consistent:
- Each Root Hub links to all Pillar pages
- Each Pillar page:
- links back to the Root Hub
- links to all articles in that pillar
- Each Article contains ~7 internal links:
- 5–6 links to related articles within the same pillar
- 1 link back to its pillar page
- occasionally 1 contextual link to a related article in another pillar or a 1 contextual link to the pricing page
There are no orphan pages.
Here’s a simplified diagram of the structure:
Publishing strategy: topical authority bursts
The strategy is simple:
- Week 1–4: Publish 1 full pillar per week, each with ~25 articles
- After month one: Increase to 2 pillars per week (~50 articles/week)
All articles in a pillar are published together.
Why batch publishing instead of drip publishing?
When you publish a single article, Google initially sees:
- an isolated document
- weak topical confidence
- limited context
When you publish 25 interlinked articles at once, Google sees:
- a topic graph
- repeated entities and terminology
- clear topical boundaries
Instead of learning over months, the system gets context immediately.
Batch publishing also creates instant reinforcement:
- Internal links exist from day one -Pillar ↔ article relationships are visible immediately
- Semantic overlap appears simultaneously, not gradually
So instead of:
Page A → waits
Page B → waits
Page C → waits
Google gets:
“This entire section is about this topic.”
That’s the hypothesis.
Technical setup
On Day 0:
- Google Search Console was set up
- Sitemap submitted
- Social accounts created (LinkedIn, X, Facebook)
- No paid campaigns, no ads, no outreach
The site was simply published and left to be discovered.
Initial signals (Day 1)
As of January 12, 2026:
- Google indexed 10 pages within ~24 hours
- Crawl activity started almost immediately
- Indexing was faster than expected for a brand-new domain
This doesn’t mean success—only that discovery happened quickly.
What happens next
From here, the plan is to:
- monitor indexing behavior
- observe crawl patterns
- expand pillars consistently
- adjust structure only if data forces it
No shortcuts, no optimization tricks—just execution and observation.
I’ll continue documenting updates as data comes in, whether results are positive or not.
Context:
This experiment is being run on a brand-new site: https://topicalhq.com
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