StockVS

Week 7 building StockVS — the multilingual stock data platform covering 8,000+ US and 2,500 Canadian tickers across 12 languages. Still $0 revenue. But the signals this week are genuinely interesting.

Last week I discovered my Gumroad store was broken in three ways: wrong pricing ($129 instead of $29 on my flagship product), currency mismatches (CAD$ instead of USD$), and the public store page showing zero products. That explained five weeks of zero sales.

This week's focus was the indexing collapse — and there's finally a positive signal.

The Numbers (April 8, 2026)

• Google indexed pages: ~1,560 (flat — still down 35% from the 2,425 peak)

• - Google 7-day avg position: 7.5 — inside the top 8 for the second straight week

• - Google 28-day avg position: 18.6 — all-time best, holding for 8 consecutive days

• - 3 queries on Google page 1: "hcat" (pos 8.5), "nutrien stock overview" (pos 9.0), "durasteel ev/ebitda" (pos 9.4)

• - Google sitemap: re-read April 7 with 103,487 discovered pages (+3,063 new)

• - Bing: ~9,700 pages indexed (stable after weeks of decline)

• - Yandex: ~15,309 searchable pages (stable)

• - GA4: 60 active users (28d), Bing driving 39 organic sessions

• - Gumroad: 14 products, 0 sales, 1 follower

• - Articles: 12 published across Dev.to, Medium, Hashnode

The Paradox

Google ranks my indexed pages really well (avg position 7.5 over the last 7 days) but refuses to index more than ~1.5% of the 103K pages it has discovered. The content template clearly works for the pages that make it through. Check the Nutrien stock page at https://stockvs.com/en/stock/ntr — it's sitting at position 9.0 for "nutrien stock overview."

So why won't Google index the rest?

Root Cause Found (and Fixing Itself)

The answer was embarrassingly simple: my non-English pages had English AI analysis text. I use a local LLM to generate stock analysis, and for months it was outputting English body text on French, German, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, and 6 other language pages. Google crawled them, saw the language mismatch, and rejected them as low quality.

This week I audited pages across multiple languages and found the fix is propagating. A Spanish Microsoft page that had 49 English patterns last week now shows only 3 (UI labels only). A Japanese Tesla page shows just 1 English pattern with zero English sentences in the analysis. If this continues across all ~27,500 non-English pages, it could be the turning point for indexing recovery.

Other Wins

Google re-read my sitemap on April 7 and discovered 3,063 new pages (103,487 total). That's the strongest sitemap activity in weeks. All listing page titles and meta descriptions are now fixed across every page type. The technology sector page (https://stockvs.com/en/stocks/sector/technology) went from a 27-character title to a proper 51-character one.

What's Not Working

Zero editorial backlinks. Domain Rating is still 0. I have 23 guest post targets and 12 articles published, but not a single real backlink. Gumroad is still a ghost town — fixing the pricing and currency issues this week. Also launched a new project: purchased nordicflightdeals.com for a flight deal alert service targeting Nordic travelers. Scored 46/50 on my evaluation framework — highest ever.

Still $0 after 7 weeks. But the ranking data says the content works — I just need Google to index more of it. See the data in action: https://stockvs.com/en/stock/ntr (Nutrien — page 1 ranking) and https://stockvs.com/en/stocks/sector/technology (sector overview with 1,200+ words of analysis).

Anyone else building a large programmatic site and dealing with the "great rankings, terrible indexing" paradox?

Week 6 building StockVS — the programmatic SEO stock data platform covering 8,000+ US and 2,500 Canadian tickers across 12 languages.

My flagship product — a Programmatic SEO Blueprint — was listed at $129 on Gumroad. The intended price? $29. For five weeks, anyone who clicked through from my 11 articles across Dev.to, Medium, and Hashnode saw a price 4.4x higher than what I designed the funnel around.

It gets worse. Six of my newer Claude Skills were displaying prices in CAD$ instead of USD$. So an international buyer sees "$19 CAD" and has no idea what they're actually paying. Friction on top of friction.

Meanwhile, my actual product metrics look healthy everywhere except the checkout:

• Google 7-day avg position: 7.1 — historic best, inside the top 10

• 3 queries ranking on Google page 1 (stock tickers like "hcat" at position 8.5)

• 58 active users in the last 28 days (GA4)

• 24 Dev.to followers (up 20% week-over-week)

• Bing driving 39 organic sessions/month — now my #1 search traffic source

The site itself is getting real traction. Check out the AAPL analysis page (https://stockvs.com/en/stock/aapl) or the SPY ETF breakdown (https://stockvs.com/en/etf/spy) to see the format — pages are being crawled and indexed across Google, Bing, and Yandex.

But the Gumroad store? A ghost town. Zero visible views on the dashboard. Zero sales. And now I know at least part of why.

The lesson: I automated everything — content publishing, SEO auditing, even product building (I have a scheduled pipeline that scouts niches, builds skills, and creates Gumroad listings). But I never once manually checked the live store page as a buyer would. I was so focused on the supply side (build more products, write more articles) that I ignored the demand side (does the checkout actually work?).

This week I'm fixing the pricing, auditing every Gumroad listing as if I were a first-time buyer, and checking whether the store page itself even displays products correctly.

Has anyone else found their "obvious" conversion blocker hiding in plain sight? I'd love to hear your "I can't believe I missed that" stories.

StockVS is a multilingual stock data platform — 8,000+ US tickers, 2,500 ETFs, 12 languages. Last week was the best week yet:

• 2,425 pages indexed by Google — all-time high, up 31% in one week

• 28-day average position dropped from 52 to 27.7 — rankings accelerating fast

• 39 queries now in Google's top 10, up from 12 two weeks ago

• Bing at 11,600 indexed pages, Yandex at 15,333 — both growing steadily

I was feeling great. Then I ran a routine page audit on the Canadian stock pages I added three weeks ago (2,500 TSX tickers like RY.TO and BNS.TO).

Every. Single. One. Returns an AccessDenied XML error from Digital Ocean Spaces.

That's roughly 30,000 pages (2,500 tickers × 12 languages) serving error pages instead of HTML. Google has been crawling these URLs and getting errors for weeks — which could be poisoning the quality signals for the entire domain, including the US pages that are actually ranking.

The likely cause: the .to suffix in TSX ticker symbols causes path resolution issues in static file hosting. When Astro builds the page at /en/stock/ry.to/index.html, Digital Ocean Spaces chokes on the .to in the path — possibly interpreting it as a domain extension rather than a file path.

The irony? The massive spike in Google's "discovered but not indexed" bucket (from 25K to 73K pages) that I attributed to Google just being slow... was probably Google discovering 50,000 broken pages and rightfully refusing to index them.

The US pages are fine — check the AAPL analysis at https://stockvs.com/en/stock/aapl or the SPY ETF page at https://stockvs.com/en/etf/spy to see what a healthy page looks like.

What I'm doing about it:

1. Filed as P1/Urgent in Linear (DEV-94)

2. Investigating URL encoding or path rewriting to fix .to resolution

3. May need to restructure TSX URLs entirely (e.g., /en/stock/ry-to instead of /en/stock/ry.to)

This is a reminder that adding a new market to a programmatic site isn't just "run the same pipeline with new tickers." Edge cases in URL structures can break at the hosting layer in ways you'd never catch without auditing.

Has anyone else hit hosting issues with special characters (dots, hashes, etc.) in URL paths on S3-compatible storage? Curious if this is a known DO Spaces gotcha or if I need to rethink my URL scheme entirely.

I launched my first Gumroad product on March 8. Four weeks later, here's the scorecard:

- 8 products listed (1 PDF guide + 7 Claude Skills, $12-$29 each)

- 10 articles published across Dev.to, Medium, and Hashnode

- 20 Dev.to followers, 1 Gumroad follower

- $0 in revenue. Zero sales.

Meanwhile, the side project those products are built around — StockVS, a multilingual stock data platform — just hit an all-time high of 2,425 Google-indexed pages and 39 queries ranking in the top 10. The technology sector page is pulling impressions. The SPY ETF page is live in 12 languages. Traffic is growing (+26% weekly active users).

So why zero revenue? Three mistakes I can see clearly now:

1. I built a content funnel, not a sales funnel. Every article links to Gumroad, but it's a cold link at the bottom of a technical blog post. Nobody reading "How I Use a Local LLM to Generate SEO Content" is thinking "let me buy a $19 skill right now." The articles build credibility, but the CTA placement and context are wrong.

2. Zero social proof = zero trust. My Gumroad store has 0 reviews, 0 sales badges, 0 testimonials. When someone lands on a product page from a stranger's blog post, there's nothing to push them over the edge. I should have given away 10-20 copies to get reviews before trying to sell.

3. I optimized for volume, not conversion. I built an automated product machine (scout niches → build skills → publish articles) that's impressively efficient. But "8 products in 4 weeks" means none of them got the love they needed. Each product got exactly one launch article and then... silence.

What I'm changing:

- Pick the ONE product with the most natural demand signal and focus all energy there

- Create a free email course or tutorial series that demonstrates the skill in action

- Get 10 free copies into the hands of people who'll leave reviews

The irony is that StockVS — the project with zero monetization — is actually gaining traction. Google is indexing pages at the fastest rate since launch. Maybe the lesson is that distribution takes longer than building, and I need to be more patient with the product side too.

Has anyone here successfully launched digital products on Gumroad with zero existing audience? What actually moved the needle for your first sale?

Google just indexed 513 new pages on my site in a single week. After weeks of decline, that's a 38.4% increase — the biggest weekly gain since launch.

Here's what happened and what I think caused it.

The backstory

I run StockVS, a programmatic SEO platform serving stock, ETF, and sector data across 12 languages. At peak, Google had indexed 2,246 pages. Then it started dropping — week after week. By mid-March I was down to 1,335 indexed pages out of ~85,000 submitted.

The "discovered - not indexed" bucket had ballooned to nearly 30,000 URLs. Google knew the pages existed but wouldn't even crawl them.

What I changed

Three things happened in the past few weeks:

1. Killed all comparison pages. I had thousands of thin "Stock A vs Stock B" pages that were diluting quality signals. Removed them entirely with 301 redirects. Painful, but necessary.

2. Thickened content on core pages. Stock analysis sections went from 200 words to 600-800 words of structured, data-driven content. Check out the AAPL analysis page — it now has financial metrics, news, related stocks, and sector context all on one page.

3. Added new high-quality page types. Exchange browse pages, ETF category listings, and industry pages — each with 400-600 words of unique SEO text. The Technology sector page has over 1,200 words now.

This week's numbers

• 1,848 pages indexed (up from 1,335 — still below 2,246 peak, but recovering fast)

• "Discovered - not indexed" dropped by 3,772 — Google is actively processing URLs it previously ignored

• 70 active users on GA4 (up 19%), avg engagement time jumped from 13s to 1m 34s

• Bing: first AI citation ever — Microsoft Copilot cited StockVS in a search result

• 2 queries in Google's top 10: "hcat" at position 8.5 and "durasteel ev/ebitda" at position 9.4

Still at $0 revenue and 0 real backlinks though. The SPY ETF page has full structured data and hreflang across 12 languages — just needs authority.

What's next

The pattern seems clear: Google rewards fewer, better pages over thousands of thin ones. I'm going to keep thickening content on stock and ETF pages while building backlinks through content marketing (10 articles published across Dev.to, Medium, and Hashnode so far).

Has anyone else seen a similar indexing recovery after removing thin content? Curious if this is a common pattern or if I just got lucky with timing.

Google keeps dropping pages from my index. But here's the thing — the other search engines are telling a completely different story.

I run StockVS, a programmatic SEO stock analysis site serving 8,000+ tickers in 12 languages. Week 3 numbers just landed.

The Multi-Engine Scorecard

• Google indexed: 1,335 pages (down 582 from last week — 40% below peak of 2,246)

• Bing indexed: 15,517 pages (stable — that's 11.6x more than Google)

• Yandex searchable: 14,595 pages (up 132, steady growth)

• Google impressions (3mo): 2,190

• GA4 active users (28d): 70 (up 19%)

• Bing organic sessions: 21 — now my #1 search traffic source

• Products on Gumroad: 8 (2 new this week — GEO Optimizer + Backlink Prospector)

• Revenue: $0 (but got my first Gumroad follower — hi SyncShuttle!)

• Articles published: 9 across Dev.to, Medium, Hashnode

• Backlinks: 0 real ones (this is the #1 blocker)

The Insight

Google is rejecting most of my pages (52,486 crawled but not indexed). Meanwhile Bing and Yandex are happily indexing 10-11x more content from the exact same site.

The difference? Backlinks. Google's quality threshold is heavily gated by authority signals. Bing and Yandex seem to evaluate page content more independently. For a new site with zero backlinks, this means Bing is actually a more accessible growth channel right now.

What's Next

This week I'm going hard on backlinks — submitting my HackerNoon article (8 days overdue), sending the 6 guest post pitches sitting in Outlook drafts, and fixing the Dutch page translations that are blocking my best-performing queries.

If you're building a content site and only watching Google, you might be missing where your real traffic is coming from.

See the data in action:

• stockvs.com/en/stock/aapl — Apple stock analysis

• stockvs.com/en/stocks/sector/technology — Technology sector overview

• stockvs.com/en/etf/spy — SPY ETF page

Hey IH — bifking here with the biweekly update on StockVS, my programmatic SEO stock analysis site.

Quick context if you're new: I built a site that serves financial analysis for 8,000+ US stock tickers across 12 languages. Think "[ticker] stock analysis" pages generated at scale using a local LLM (Llama 3) + live financial data. The whole thing runs on Astro as a static site, hosted on Digital Ocean Spaces + Cloudflare CDN.

Here's where things stand after ~3 weeks of pushing hard.

The Numbers

• Pages indexed (Google): 1,575 — down 671 from peak of 2,246 (29.9% loss)

• Search impressions (3mo): 2,189 — slowly climbing

• Search clicks (3mo): 3. Yeah... three.

• Avg position: 52.5 — but two queries cracking top 10

• Yandex searchable: ~14,512 — stable after a scary 99.7% collapse scare

• Bing indexed: 15,517 — 10x what Google indexes

• Real backlinks: 0. This is the bottleneck.

• Gumroad revenue: $0 — 8 products listed, 0 sales

• Articles published: 9 across Dev.to, Medium, Hashnode

The honest truth: Google is only indexing 1.4% of my pages. Over 51,000 pages were crawled and rejected, and another 16,800 URLs are sitting in "discovered — not indexed" limbo.

But here's what keeps me going: two queries are ranking in the top 10. "hcat" sits at position 8.5 with 23 impressions, and "durasteel ev/ebitda" is at 9.4 with 20 impressions. The content can rank — I just need more authority signals.

You can see what those pages look like here: stockvs.com/en/stock/aapl — each stock page now has 600-800 words of original analysis, financial metrics, related news, and peer comparisons.

What I Shipped

1. Two new Claude Skills built and listed. GEO Optimizer ($19) and Backlink Prospector ($19), both on Gumroad with free lite versions on GitHub. That brings the total product count to 8. The product machine (scout → build → launch → promote) is running on autopilot via scheduled tasks.

2. Content thickening is working. Stock pages went from thin data tables to real analysis content. Sections got reordered for better UX, timestamps added for freshness signals, and related news is now pulling in. Here's a sector page for reference: stockvs.com/en/stocks/sector/technology.

3. Nine articles cross-posted across Dev.to, Medium, and Hashnode. Every article promotes a specific Gumroad product. Latest one covered optimizing for AI search engines (not just Google) using our ETF pages as a case study.

4. Guest post pipeline built. 23 targets identified including HackerNoon (DA 82), Smashing Magazine (DA 90), SitePoint (DA 80), and VentureBeat (DA 93). 4 pitched, 6 Outlook drafts ready to send. A HackerNoon deep-dive on multilingual SEO architecture is written and waiting for submission.

What Didn't Work

Google's indexing keeps declining. I removed comparison pages (thin content) hoping it would help Google focus on quality pages. Instead, the indexed count just kept dropping. The redirects are being processed, but Google isn't backfilling with new pages.

Yandex had a terrifying moment. Searchable pages went from 14,463 to 43 overnight — a 99.7% collapse. Turned out to be a data glitch, not actual de-indexing. It recovered and has been stable for a week now. But that 24 hours was rough.

Zero Gumroad sales. 8 products, 9 articles with CTAs, and not a single conversion. The funnel bottleneck is clear: article readers aren't clicking through to the store. Need to rethink the CTA strategy or the product-market fit.

What's Next

1. Backlinks are priority #1. The site has zero real backlinks. Every search engine is telling me the same thing: "Your content is fine, but nobody vouches for you." Submitting the HackerNoon article (7 stockvs.com backlinks) and sending the guest post pitches are the highest-leverage things I can do right now.

2. Fix the Dutch page quality issue. GSC data shows Dutch queries dominate impressions ("mdxhealth koers" at 56 impressions) but the analysis content on those pages is still in English. That's a language mismatch killing CTR on my best-performing pages.

3. Keep the product machine running. The niche scout → skill builder → article publisher pipeline is fully automated. Next Wednesday it'll scout new skill ideas, build them, and the article publisher will promote them.

One Takeaway

Bing indexes 10x more of my site than Google. If you're running a large programmatic site and only watching Google Search Console, you're missing the picture. Yandex indexed 14,500 pages. Bing has 15,500. Google? 1,575. Same content, same sitemap, wildly different results. Multi-engine SEO isn't optional anymore — especially if your early traffic might come from AI search tools that pull from Bing's index (like Copilot and ChatGPT Browse).

Follow the build at stockvs.com. Revenue is still $0 but the infrastructure is built and the content is thickening. Now it's a backlink game.

I built a multilingual stock comparison tool covering 8,000 US stocks across 12 languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Chinese, etc).

Why: Got tired of switching between Yahoo Finance tabs and wanted something that works in multiple languages for international market research.

Tech: Astro for static generation, 240k+ pages, local Llama for AI analysis, yfinance API for data.

Current status: Live with all stock pages, working on getting indexed by Google (classic programmatic SEO challenge - lots of pages, new domain, need backlinks).

Would love feedback on the UX and comparison layout!

Link: stockvs.com