I rebuilt my portfolio site earlier this year. Three months later, Google Search Console showed 27,000 impressions and 46 clicks. Not viral numbers, but for a personal dev portfolio it's not bad.
The data I tracked was Search Console data, git commits, and content publish dates. Here's what I found when I overlaid them. Your numbers and timeline will look different, but the patterns might not.
The setup
My site runs on Next.js with Sanity CMS. Before February 2026, I had a basic portfolio with projects and blog posts imported from Medium. They have been living there for a while because it was easy to write there: good editor, built-in audience, nice formatting out of the box. But that meant all the SEO value was going to Medium, not to my own site. The site was getting maybe 1-2 impressions per day, mostly from branded searches like "snaijer" or "de snaijer."
So the plan was: make my own site the primary home for my content. I rebuilt the blog infrastructure in Sanity CMS with the same features that made Medium comfortable to write on (code blocks with syntax highlighting, copy buttons, embedded demos). Then I set up canonical links on the Medium versions pointing back to my site. That tells Google "the original lives here, not on Medium."
