Hi! I want to tell you a story about two weeks we spent figuring out who tanked our site in Google. We found someone, we were pleased with ourselves, and then it turned out we'd got the wrong guy.
A bit of context first. We build Toolevia, which is eighty-four file tools that run right in your browser: merge PDFs, strip the background off a photo, work out how much a mortgage really costs, that sort of thing. The file never leaves your machine, because there isn't a server in the picture to send it to. We spent three months writing it, and in August we shipped the whole thing over three weeks: 84 tools in 58 languages, which multiplies out to 5,104 pages.
And, to our mild surprise, it took off. On August 8 Google had 494 of our pages in its index; ten days later it had 2,218, and on the 20th the site showed up in search results 1,269 times in one day. For a domain that was two weeks old this felt genuinely good, and I'll admit we got a little pleased with ourselves.
Then on August 21 we had 1,134 impressions. On the 22nd, 216. On the 23rd, three. Not three thousand, not three hundred — three, for the whole day. And that's roughly where it stayed, somewhere between one and seven a day, right through the end of the month, as if someone had turned the dial all the way down and gone home.
