I built a free calculator site from scratch: 3 weeks of honest Search Console data

Three weeks ago I started an SEO experiment: build a set of free US work and pay calculators, host them on free GitHub Pages, and track everything in Google Search Console in public. No budget, no custom domain, no backlinks.

This is the honest report, including the parts that did not go well.

What I built

EverydayCalc is a static site with 10 calculators: work hours, time card, overtime, a California overtime calculator, lunch break, hours between two times, hourly to salary, salary to hourly, BMI and paycheck.

Each page has the calculator first, then the formula, worked examples, a visible FAQ and links to official sources (U.S. Department of Labor, California DIR). I wrote the FAQ schema to match the visible FAQ, and I added a "Quick answer" box at the top of each page so a search engine or AI answer can quote it.

The numbers (23 Oct to 12 Nov)

• Impressions: about 930 in total, from 0 on the first day to a peak of 173 in one day (3 Nov)
• Clicks: 4, and all four were me checking my own site
• Average position: about 29
• Queries Google showed the site for: over 100, almost all long-tail ("time calculator with lunch", "8 to 5 how many hours")
• Best position for a single query: 13 ("hourly labor calculator")
• Where the impressions came from: the United States had the most (position around 43, so page 4 or 5), then Brazil, Canada, Russia and Bangladesh

What went wrong

1. Impressions fell after the peak. After 3 Nov the daily number dropped from 173 to 91, then 14, then 0 on 10 and 11 Nov.

2. Some pages are "Crawled - currently not indexed". In the Page indexing report, 9 pages were indexed and 4 were not: the home page, the time card calculator, the overtime calculator and the contact page. When I inspected the work hours page (my best one) it also said "URL is not on Google", even though Googlebot had just fetched it successfully.

3. The sitemap says "Couldn't fetch". The XML file is valid and opens in the browser, but Search Console has not accepted it for almost two weeks.

What I think is going on (and what I am not sure about)

I am not sure, and I do not want to pretend I know. My best explanation is that Google tested a brand-new site on many queries, found no signals that anyone cared (no backlinks, no real clicks), and then stopped showing it. "Crawled - currently not indexed" usually means Google fetched the page and decided it was not worth keeping yet. The page itself is technically fine (fetch successful, no blocks, Google's chosen canonical is the page itself, so it is not seen as a duplicate).

What I am doing next

1. Waiting a week before touching the pages that are being tested, so I can tell cause from effect
2. Getting real mentions and links (this article is part of that)
3. Buying a proper domain and connecting it after the test
4. Reporting the numbers again in a week, including if they are bad

Lessons so far

• Impressions come before rankings. A site can show up for 100 queries and still get zero clicks.
• Position 30 earns nothing. Page 3 or 4 does not get clicks, so impressions alone are a vanity number.
• Always reset your Search Console filters before reading the data. I once thought my traffic had collapsed. It was a filter I forgot to clear.
• Do not change five things at once. If something moves, you will not know why.
• New sites need signals from outside. Content is not enough on its own.

If you have run into "Crawled - currently not indexed" on a new site, what worked for you? I would like to hear it in the comments.