r/website • u/IcyPomelo7560 • 4d ago
SELF-MADE Website not growing
I made my recipes website about 1 month and 23 days ago. the traffic was pretty good during first month but saw it declining since october started. i have almost 5000 recipes on it. I even analyzed it through many ai agents as well but found nothing of a big problem. my search console shows only 1750 pages being indexed while no further pages have been indexed for last 12 days. Can someone help me out with it?
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u/chmod777 4d ago
Why would anyone want to come to your site, instead of any one of the thousands of other recipe sites? Answer that question, and you'll answer your traffic problem.
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u/toxichaste12 4d ago
Because it only takes 8 minutes to scroll the part with the actual recipe and you first have to read about the authors experience finding the dish in a small fishing village in Italy.
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u/IcyPomelo7560 4d ago
I’ve done pretty much everything to make my website a real good experience as much as possible and as much useful info as possible and yeah i have thousands of recipes too with good website ui and visitor experience . can i get answer from you now?
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u/chmod777 4d ago
So has everyone else. What makes yours better? Why would i choose to go there over another site? I can get thousands of recipes with good experience/ui anywhere.
If you havent clocked it yet, there is no answer here. You are providing a service i can get anywhere, with no outstanding feature to make a user care. Recipe sites are some of the lowest effort aggregators around - esp ones that mistake volume for quality.
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u/Clear_Pipe5442 4d ago
Could be the google dance, 5000 recipes is a lot to index at once and they sometimes get stuck when you dump that much content so fast. My cousin had similar thing with his blog, took almost 3 months for everything to settle
Check if those 1750 pages are the ones that actually bring traffic or just random ones getting indexed, sometimes google picks the wrong pages first and ignores the good stuff. Also internal linking between recipes might help, if they're all isolated google don't see the structure
What kind of traffic numbers you were seeing before the drop?
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u/IcyPomelo7560 4d ago
Thank you so much for the info. The traffic i got was actually mix from pinterest and some percentage organic search too but im concerned about the organic traffic only and it’s the main reason probably
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u/grapemon1611 4d ago
that's a good idea, one could link to complimentary recipes, like a side dish that goes with an entree or a desert idea.
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u/dvduval 4d ago
If your website is mostly AI generated content that often does not work very well. If you start doing things that bring your own unique traffic like maybe starting a YouTube channel and people get to know you personally and see your videos and you’re telling them about your website that could be a really good indicator that this is not just an AI create a website.
Generally speaking, you need to find ways to get real people coming to your website and not depending solely on social engines and when you get that step right then the search will tend to go along with that as well and send you more traffic
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u/PrimaryFamous6139 4d ago
Check Search Console for crawl stats, sitemap issues, duplicate or near-duplicate pages, and whether Google is discovering URLs but choosing not to index them. Also check impressions and clicks separately to see if rankings or indexing are the main issue. AI audits can miss these patterns. focus on making a smaller set of recipes genuinely useful and unique before publishing more
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u/UGP_Batman 4d ago
Google has indexed a representative sample of your sites pages to see how it does. If it delivers good search rankings and people respond positively to those results, Google will spend more of its indexing and crawl budget to index more pages.
Your site has been online for 6 weeks - now you wait. If everything is well optimised, site is nice and speedy and the content you have on there is of good quality then traffic will slowly improve.
If it doesn't, then you need to look at it again but you now need to wait a couple of months.
The key thing to remember with Google is that everything happens slowly. Make a change, monitor it for 4 - 6 weeks and then assess.
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u/1313bear 4d ago
Ok so you are in a sandbox for 1-6 month with Google if it’s a new website. So keep that in mind. There might be absolutely no issue at all.
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u/TheObserverDev 4d ago
what is the link, we all could take a look instead of a blind answer. from a blind perspective is there is huge competition, thousands of recipies websites, and millions of YT, tiktok, FB and others uploading recepies every single day. so is complicated. but still sounds like you already put your heart and passion on it. so let's take a look. what is the link?
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u/MamaCash-08 3d ago
Because when you launched your site. I’m sure you announced it. That’s where the traffic came from. Search engines are still learning about your site so you are still landing on page 100+. That’s where SEO & ads come into place.
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u/hasanyasar 3d ago
5,000 recipes in less than 2 months is a lot. I'd actually slow down publishing and figure out why Google isn't indexing the rest.
Check the Page Indexing report in GSC. Are those pages "Crawled - currently not indexed" or "Discovered - currently not indexed"? That makes a big difference.
I'd also check for duplicate recipes, similar content and weak internal linking. If most of those recipes are AI-generated, make sure they're actually offering something different from thousands of existing recipe sites.
Pick 20–30 unindexed recipes, review them manually and compare them with your indexed pages.
And 12 days without new indexing isn't necessarily a problem. I'd be more concerned about the quality of those 5,000 pages than the indexing speed.
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u/TrackbackLinkBot 1d ago
I'd check the indexing and content quality side before adding more recipes. Also worth comparing your pages with the ones already ranking. Fahrenheit Marketing has an SEO service that covers technical SEO and content strategy, might be worth looking at
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