30 days ago I launched RelahConvert — a free browser-based image toolkit with 37 tools across 25 languages.
I thought the hard part was building it. I was wrong.
The First Week Felt Amazing
Impressions climbed daily. Pages were getting indexed fast.
GSC was showing 100-150 impressions per day. I thought I was
onto something.
Then Google pulled the rug.
The Drop Nobody Warns You About
Around day 20, impressions crashed to near zero. Some days
literally 0 or 1 impression.
Meanwhile GSC kept indexing more pages. 207 indexed. Then
952 Pages being discovered.
But impressions? Flatline.
I spent days trying to figure out what I did wrong.
What I Actually Found
Running a Semrush audit revealed three real issues:
48 hreflang conflicts — my language pages had canonical
tags pointing to the English version instead of themselves.
Google was getting contradictory signals on 48 pages.
24 incorrect sitemap URLs — a trailing slash
inconsistency between my sitemap and canonical tags.
The sitemap said /compress/ but the canonical said /compress.
Result: Google was seeing 3 different signals for the
same URL and didn't know which one to trust.
The Fix
Each language page canonical now points to itself:
- /fr/compress/ canonical → relahconvert.com/fr/compress/
- /ar/compress/ canonical → relahconvert.com/ar/compress/
And the sitemap now consistently matches the canonical
format across all 1,075 URLs.
What Happened After
External backlinks jumped from 2 to 10 in GSC.
Internal links jumped from 531 to 1,770.
FAQ rich results grew from 38 to 57.
Impressions? Still recovering. I learnt Google needs 2-4 weeks
to recrawl and reassess after canonical changes.
What I Learned
Google doesn't punish you for fixing things. But it
does take time to process changes — especially on a
domain that's only 30 days old.
The hardest part isn't the technical fixes. It's
watching your numbers flatline while knowing the
fix is in and you just have to wait.
Where I Am Now
- 207 pages indexed
- 57 valid FAQ rich results
- 10 external backlinks
- 1,770 internal links
- Position 76 average (working on it)
Day 30. Still building. Still waiting.
If you're in the same spot — new site, confusing GSC
data, impression drops that make no sense — you're
probably not doing anything wrong. Google just takes
time with new domains.
Building RelahConvert in public
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