Quick update on the thing I’ve been building
Two small things caught my eye in tech this week before I get to my own stuff. Google pushed its fourth spam update of the year on September 24. Fourth. They did exactly one in all of 2025. Whatever they’re cleaning up, they’re not being casual about it. And a handful of SaaS rounds closed this week, real estate AI, lending AI, procurement AI, none of them new technology, just existing AI wrapped around one specific boring problem. Worth remembering, because that’s basically what I keep relearning on my own tiny project too, just with way fewer zeros.
Okay, my actual week.
I’ve been building this little site around public holidays, working days, basic travel planning stuff. Small, unglamorous, half the pages just answer one specific question and that’s it. For the first month traffic was a flat line. Low double digits a day, mostly me refreshing it like an idiot.
Then one week it jumped from around 40 visits a day to over 300 on the best day. I know that’s not a real number to most people but after staring at single digits for weeks, I actually yelled a little.
What caused it wasn’t clever. One page answered a very specific question, something like how many working days are left in a given month, for a few different countries, and Google just started sending it traffic I never specifically chased. Turns out people type stuff like that straight into search instead of opening a calculator, and most pages ranking for it buried the actual number under three paragraphs of nothing. Answer the annoying question fast and don’t make someone scroll. That’s the whole trick, apparently.
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The more annoying problem was indexing. I kept publishing pages and Google just wasn’t picking them up. Not ranking badly, not indexed at all. Search Console sat there for days saying discovered, not indexed, like it was mocking me.
Turns out I just wasn’t linking to my own pages. They existed, sitemap and all, but nothing else on the site pointed at them, so Google crawled them and basically shrugged. Fair, honestly. I went back and added real links between related pages instead of leaning on the sitemap, and within a couple weeks the backlog started clearing.
One thing that genuinely surprised me: Bing is doing more work than I expected, something like 15 percent of total traffic. I’d mentally filed Bing under “doesn’t matter” like everyone does, and it just quietly kept sending people anyway.
Given Google just dropped another spam update, I’m spending this week fixing old thin pages instead of publishing new ones. A few early pages are clearly written by someone who didn’t know what they were doing yet, which, fair, that was me two months ago. Those feel like exactly what gets swept up when Google says it’s targeting low effort content.
No big launch here, no number I’m bragging about. Just links, a few fixed pages, and a graph that’s finally pointing the right way more days than not. More soon.
Stay sharp. See you soon.