One new site got 7,000+ impressions in a week; another got zero. What I'm learning about Google indexing (from an aerospace engineer)

Hello Everyone,
I'm an aerospace engineering graduate, and I got fascinated by something that has nothing to do with rockets: how Google crawls the web to build its index. A huge database that's constantly changing, and it decides in the background which pages exist. I wanted to understand it properly, so I set up an experiment on myself.

The plan was to build real sites and watch what Google does with them. I'm running this on about five sites now. This post is about two of them, because the difference between them surprised me a lot.

The surprising comparison

Site A is one of my older experiments. In its first week, Search Console showed 26 clicks and over 7,000 impressions. Here's what the first week looked like:

The average position went from about 46 on day 1 to about 15.5 on day 7. That's mostly page 2, with a few queries up on page 1, and the click rate was about 0.35%. So it isn't traffic worth bragging about yet. But I didn't expect any of it so soon.

Site B is the one I'm describing in the rest of this post. It went live two days ago. Search Console currently shows zero impressions and zero clicks, and I have no customers.

My other sites have been progressing much more slowly than Site A. So Site A looks like the outlier, and I honestly don't know why.

How Site A is built

Since the jump surprised me, here's what's actually on it. It has roughly 2,700 pages in its sitemap:

• About 2,100 product pages. Each covers one specific product and answers one question people actually type: how long do I wait before I can do the next step?
• About 340 manufacturer pages, each listing that company's products.
• About 90 timer pages, 40 comparison pages, and a handful of guides, troubleshooting pages and timelines.

A product page leads with the short answer. Then it shows the manufacturer's own stated times, a link to the manufacturer's data sheet and home page, a "confirm this is your product" check, a "before you start" section, how to check you're ready, and a common mistake to avoid. At the bottom: a short FAQ (with structured data), similar products from other brands, other products from the same manufacturer, and comparison links.

There's also a small tool on every page. You tap Start countdown and it shows the milestones, with buttons to add a calendar reminder (an .ics file, or Google or Outlook) or save it on your phone. No account, and it can be installed like an app.

Around the pages: search, browsing by category, browsing by manufacturer, a "what do you want to do next?" entry point, compare pages, and a "my projects" area for saved timers. Product, manufacturer, category and comparison pages all link to each other.

I generate the pages from a structured dataset instead of writing them by hand, so every page has the same layout and a consistent answer.

My guesses for why it took off: it answers very specific questions with an exact answer from a primary source, there are thousands of those questions, and each page is a direct match for one. Site B's topic is broader, and it competes with much bigger sites. But that's a guess, and I'd like to hear better ones.

What Site B is

I needed something to sell, and I picked dynamic QR codes, the kind where you print a code once and can change where it points later.

What shocked me was the price. A lot of services charge a subscription for a single code, billed monthly or yearly. The cheapest plans I found that include an editable code run from roughly $60 to $350 a year. I kept thinking: what upkeep does one code actually need? A code is a short address and a redirect. What infrastructure is that?

So I tried building the cheapest thing that could possibly work. The result is threedollarqrcode.com: $3, once, no account, no subscription.

How it's built

Claude (an AI assistant) wrote essentially all of the code, so I'll say that plainly. One tip from the experience: ask it for the impossible. In my experience it adjusts down to its real limits. If you ask right at what you think the limit is, you tend to get an answer below it.

The setup is small:

Buyer -> Stripe Checkout -> (paid)
                              |
Raspberry Pi (Python loop, every 10 s)
  reads paid sessions from Stripe (outbound requests only)
  makes the code page + QR file
  commits to GitHub  -->  Cloudflare Pages deploys
  emails the buyer their code + private edit link

Someone scans a code -> Cloudflare Pages Function
  counts the open in D1 (SQLite)
  shows where they're going and sends them on
  (the Pi isn't involved)

A few design choices:

• Scans never touch the Pi. It only publishes new orders, so if I unplug it, every existing code keeps working.
• No open ports at home. The Pi only makes outbound requests, using a read-only Stripe key.
• I can't change a customer's code. The edit key is random and appears only in their email and order page. I store just its hash, and the key sits after the # in the URL, which browsers don't send to a server.
• Destinations are checked: https only, no link shorteners, no bare IP addresses. A failed one gets an automatic refund.

What it costs

I pay $5 a month for a Cloudflare subscription. It's possible without it, since the free tiers should cover a site this small, and I paid for headroom while I experiment. The domain is about $10 a year, plus Stripe's normal per-sale fee. I wanted the lowest upkeep I could get.

Free for school emails

Since one more code costs me almost nothing, anyone with a school or college email (.edu and similar) can get a dynamic code free. You enter the email and the link, I send a confirmation link, and your code arrives by email. There are limits: one per address per year, plus daily caps. A school email doesn't prove you're a teacher, since students have them too, and the page says so.

What I'm doing about indexing on Site B

I built about 190 pages, a few free tools that run in the browser (a QR scanner and tester), and a free generator. I submitted a sitemap, grouped pages into topic hubs with internal links, and added one backlink from an older site of mine.

What I've learned so far:

• Getting crawled and getting indexed are two different things.
• Impressions come last. Google has to find your page, decide to keep it, and only then rank it.
• Lots of near-identical pages isn't the answer, so I tried to make each one different.

I'll post an update with real numbers in a few weeks.

What I got wrong

I built a styling tool and print-ready sign layouts before I had a single customer. And git as a publishing database won't scale: each order adds files and triggers a deploy, so at a few thousand orders I'd write codes straight into the database from a Worker and drop the Pi. A power cut in the middle of a git command can also leave a lock file that blocks later pushes, so I added a cleanup and a network watchdog.

What I'd like to know

1. Does my understanding of crawling versus indexing sound right to people who've done this?
2. Why might one brand-new site get thousands of impressions in its first week while another sits at zero? What would you look at first?
3. Is there a reason subscriptions exist that a pay-once model misses?
4. For a brand-new site, what would you check first when it sits at zero impressions?

Transparency: Claude wrote the code for this site, and I used AI to help draft and edit this post. The decisions, the mistakes and the numbers are mine.