NodeRecipe

I've been building a free n8n template site for about a month. Ten

articles, eight importable workflows, no email gate. Standard stuff.

I check Search Console every few days and log the numbers in a CSV. The

column I logged was total impressions over the trailing 3 months. On

Aug 15 it read 669. On Aug 21 it read 798.

Up and to the right. I even wrote "impressions still climbing" in my

notes.

Then I opened the daily breakdown:

| Day | Impressions |

|--------|-------------|

| Aug 11 | 85 |

| Aug 12 | 65 |

| Aug 13 | 48 |

| Aug 14 | 52 |

| Aug 15 | 56 |

| Aug 16 | 12 |

| Aug 17 | 2 |

| Aug 18 | 7 |

Daily traffic fell about 85% on Aug 16 and stayed down. It had already

been that way for two days when I wrote "still climbing."

The reason I missed it is embarrassing once you see it: a trailing

3-month cumulative total can only go up. A site that lost every visitor

tomorrow would still show a flat-to-rising 3-month number for weeks.

I had picked a metric that is structurally incapable of showing a

decline, and then used it to check for declines.

I don't know the cause yet. No manual action, site returns 200s, no

noindex, sitemap intact, and every page that used to get impressions

still gets some — they just rank about a page deeper than before. Best

guess is the new-domain visibility bump ending, since the dates don't

line up with any reported algorithm update. I'm going to sit on it for

two weeks rather than start "fixing" pages that have nothing diagnosably

wrong with them.

Two things I changed:

1. Log a rolling daily average, not a cumulative total.

2. When a number confirms what I want to believe, open the breakdown

before writing it down.

Absolute stakes here are near zero — this is 50 impressions a day and

$0 revenue. But I'd rather learn the habit at this size than at a size

where it costs something.