Built a browser-based file-tools site — found it was serving Google 500s for 3 weeks. What I'd ask for advice on.
I wanted a file-tools site where files never leave the user's device. That's more feasible now than people assume — modern browsers can do real work through WebAssembly:
- ffmpeg.wasm for video compression, conversion, GIF export
- pdf-lib and PDF.js for merging, splitting and compressing PDFs
- Tesseract for OCR
- ONNX Runtime Web for background removal
Everything runs client-side. No upload, no queue, no per-file server cost, no size ceiling from an upload limit. Only the AI document features (summarise, translate, ask questions about a file) run server-side, and they're labelled as such.
It's bilingual — English and Arabic with right-to-left layout — which was far easier to build in from the start than to retrofit.
Then I went looking at why traffic was flat, and found three things worth sharing:
1. Every blog post was returning HTTP 500 to Googlebot — for about three weeks. They rendered fine for me, because clicking from the blog index is a client-side navigation while Google always does a fresh direct request. Only the path I never tested was broken. Cause: Next.js 16 rejects a local next/image src carrying a query string unless an exact pattern is configured, and my cover URLs had a per-post cache-buster (?v=<timestamp>) that no static pattern could match.
2. Seven landing pages had zero internal links. They existed only in the sitemap, which reliably parks pages in "Discovered — currently not indexed."
3. Every tool page published its category as the H1. So nineteen pages said "Images" or "Documents" instead of "Convert image" or "Compress PDF" — and eleven shared the identical heading.
All fixed. Technical SEO is now clean: canonicals, hreflang, structured data, alt text, no duplicate titles.
WHAT I'D ASK
The site is about a month old. Impressions are climbing, clicks are basically zero, average position sits around 80 — which I understand is roughly what a new domain with no inbound links should expect.
So my question is for people who've taken a tool site from zero:
What actually produced your first real traffic — directories, a community like this, SEO content, or something else entirely? I've done the technical work and I'd rather not spend another month on the wrong channel.
Specifically curious whether anyone has had luck with embeddable widgets as a link strategy — I offer any tool as a free embed with a link back, but I'm not sure how to get it in front of the people who'd use it.
https://squishlyapp.com if useful for context.
The tricky part is that most of your current search data was collected while Google was seeing a materially different site than users were.
What would you need to observe after these fixes before concluding SEO itself is too slow and shifting meaningful effort into another acquisition channel?
Hello Aryan. Thank you for your reply.
Any good way to check wehter Google is seeing the same as users or not? I inspect my URLs throgu GSC inspector and they look the same. forgive me if this is silly as I'm not that expert in this.
Not a silly question at all. It’s a good thing to verify, especially after a major site issue.
The important part is that you’ll want to compare the signals after the fixes with enough time and data, rather than drawing conclusions from the period when the site was behaving differently.
The detail that everything runs in the browser except the AI document features really stood out. Calling that out clearly builds a lot more trust than just saying it's privacy first.
Reading this I kept thinking it feels like it should be getting a lot more organic traffic than it probably is already. Especially now that you've finally cleared the issues that were holding it back in the first month.
I'm curious. Do you have the same feeling now that those fixes are behind you?
Hello Muhammad. and thank you for your reply.
Actually because im not strong technically, I still dont feel that but i think its normal since my domain is still new, not years serving online. the issue I am facing right now is whether my implementation is correct or not. and im doing my best to reach to this conslusion.
any advise from professional like yourself is highly appreciated :)
Yes, that makes sense. Since the technical side is already mostly cleaned up, I can take a look at where the current traffic gaps are and where you may be leaking organic traffic.
If you’d like, email me at mumar@growwithmumar.online and I can guide you through what I’m seeing and what I’d focus on first.