Ask HN: How do new blogs break the backlink–indexing loop?

4 points

3 months ago

We run a small coding blog sharing our learning experience and I keep hitting the same loop: Google won't index most of our pages because the site has no authority. Authority comes from backlinks. But nobody links to a site that doesn't show up in search results. 110+ posts and almost nothing showing up on Google. Bing has started indexing them, but Google won't budge. Google indexed us in the beginning, just a bit, then after one of their updates we were destroyed and never re-covered.

We've tried long-form guides, short tutorials, long-tail keywords, competitive keywords, niche topics with zero competition. I'm not sure anymore if content is the problem.

We have no noindex issues, no missing sitemaps, no crawl errors — all the basic SEO boxes are checked. Site is submitted to Search Console, PageSpeed Insights performance is good (99% desktop, 85+ mobile).

We started cross-posting to Medium, Dev.to, and Hashnode but we can't even be sure that's the right path. We've been posting consistently, thinking consistency was the key — but it doesn't seem to be enough on its own.

It truly feels like we're fighting an invisible monster without knowing if what we're doing is correct.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not ranting — I still have patience left in me. Just thinking out loud here in case someone has been in the same shoes and found a way out.

What actually moved the needle for you? We'd appreciate any guidance.

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