Any ideas why my independent search engine gets such a small amount of traffic from Google?
On my personal blog, Google is the source of two times more traffic than all the other sources combined, which is about normal from what I understand. However, despite spending a fair bit of time on SEO specifically for Google a few months back, traffic to my search engine is almost exclusively from non-Google sources (including non-Google search engines like DuckDuckGo, Baidu and Bing). Details at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/progress-update-q1-q2-2021/ . If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd be suspicious, but I'm not, so I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation, it's just I don't know what it is yet. Anyone have any ideas?
Trending on Indie Hackers
Your personal blog ranks well because it's unique/original content, search engine is the opposite of that. From my experience, it's very hard to rank things like that on Google.
btw. your site doesn't work well on smaller displays (i.e. phone), you may want to optimize that. Otherwise, it's a cool project, good luck.
Thanks for the feedback. I've logged an issue to fix the mobile view.
I've blocked search engines from indexing my search results, partly because it doesn't really add any value, and partly to minimise load on my servers. However, I would expect certain search phrases to lead to hits on the home page.
Digging a bit deeper, and comparing the Search Performance in Bing and Google Search Console, it seems Google is indeed generating more impressions (i.e. entries in results list), but fewer clicks, e.g. for the search query "search my site" Bing has 6 impressions and 4 clicks, while Google has 145 impressions (i.e. nearly 25 times as many) but only 1 click (i.e. a quarter as many).
I wouldn't give too much weight to those numbers, as it's impossible to eliminate all the bots.
IMO this Google's war against the "thin content" is a huge problem, and the result is that their search results are full of "thick content" low quality spam, yet it's almost impossible to find high quality tools, which are "thin content" by nature.
Hi,
I have no idea how to answer your question :) but I love the idea of your project :)
Sorry for the offtopic, but how many sites have you indexed already?
Thanks for the kind words. There are 855 sites and 52,529 pages currently indexed. (You can see the number of sites on the Browse page, and if you search with an empty query it switches to search everything and shows you the total number of pages.)