From 0 to 72 indexed pages in 2 months: what Google actually does with new sites

I've been building Convertify — a free image converter in Rust + Next.js — for about 2 months. Here's where I am in GSC right now:

• 72 indexed pages
• Average position: 40.8
• Impressions: ~90/day
• Clicks: basically 1

Not glamorous. But I spent time researching what's actually happening under the hood, and it changed how I think about the whole thing.

The "Google Sandbox" thing

Everyone talks about it. New site, no traffic, must be the sandbox right?

John Mueller said it directly in 2019: "There is no sandbox." Google doesn't penalize new sites — it just hasn't collected enough trust signals yet. There's a difference.

What actually happens is closer to this timeline:

• Week 1: pages get crawled and indexed
• Weeks 2–6: Google tests your pages on low-volume queries
• Month 2–3: first stable positions for long-tail keywords
• Month 4–6: rankings start to stabilize
• Month 6–12: meaningful traffic growth

I'm at month 2. Right on schedule for "still basically nothing."

What actually moved the needle for me

A few things that made a real difference early:

Static site generation. I migrated from a Vite React SPA to Next.js SSG specifically because Google wasn't indexing my pages. Dynamic JS rendering was killing crawlability. After the migration: 186 static pages, all indexable. Impressions jumped within 2 weeks.

Internal linking. Added RelatedConversions component — every page links to 10-14 related conversion pages. Before this, new pages were getting zero impressions. After: slow but steady crawl pickup.

FAQ schema. Every landing page has FAQPage JSON-LD with 8-10 real questions. Not for rich snippets (those don't show for this type) — for entity clarity and content depth signals.

Content depth over breadth. Instead of 5 shallow pages, I focused on making each conversion page actually useful — real technical comparisons, format history, use cases. Some pages now have 10+ sections.

What didn't work (yet)

Backlinks. I spent time on directory submissions, Reddit posts, forum comments. Honest assessment: the directories that matter have 2-4 month queues. The "best image converter" articles are written by competitors. Forum comments get removed.

The only backlink strategy that feels real right now is writing content that people actually want to link to. Which is why I'm writing this.

CTR is also rough — 1 click total at position 40. That's expected. You can't get clicks from page 4. The only fix is ranking higher, which takes time.

What I'm watching now

GSC shows a spike in impressions at end of April — new pages entering the index. Then a drop. Mueller warned about this: "a site may get a spike, then return to normal — that's when you need patience."

I'm in the patience phase.

Month 4-6 is supposedly when things stabilize. I'll report back.

The honest summary

If you launched a site recently and have basically no traffic — you're probably fine. Google isn't punishing you. It's just waiting to see if you're serious.

The things that seem to matter most in the first 3 months: static rendering, internal linking, content depth, and schema markup. Not backlinks. Not social media. Just making the site technically solid and giving Google something worth indexing.

We'll see if that holds at month 6.

Building Convertify in public — free image converter, Rust + libvips backend, Next.js SSG. Week 8 of the build.