I do totally opposite. First I write about 20-30 posts about things I know and then I do research on WMT dashboard. After analysing that I continue writing in right direction. It doesn't work every time but it does sometimes and I keep going with that site.
If this is the case, then your users might be posting scraped / spun articles / content! If that's the case then that will not be doing your site any good and Google will see the scraped / spun content and that will hurt your site.
How long does this take? I couldn't imagine doing that, but to each their own. Plus, a lot of the sites I own are about topics I could care less about. So, I would need some external motivation to write or spend money writing about a particular subject - usually this comes from the organic traffic I am going to be receiving.
I know it is not right strategy but it works for me . As you can see English is not my native language, my sites are nonEnglish sites, and audience I'm targeting (for adsense) is not IT literate (which is very important if you ask me). Lately I have started IT blog and IT WP site (both ENG) to see can I do something on that.
did you use webmaster tools for your site? and check validation services for mistakes in html and CSS. If you'll make it to 100% - they give you a certificate which you can place on your site and google will appreciate that
did you try? I mean a certificate banner which can be placed in the bottom. Also, webmaster sees that the site without mistakes and that's good signal for google
I don't need to. Google indexes my site in hardly anytime. Today it indexed a post in 6 mins. To all the critics who thought I was lying, here is a screenshot. Where do you get this 'certificate' from?
This is very common depending on how often Google crawls your site. You must have a highly crawled website. Even if it isn't though, you can always force them to crawl is using Google Search Console.