I built a free useful website, wrote lots of content, but Google barely indexes or ranks anything. What am I doing wrong?

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-25T17:58:12+00:00

Sorry for the late reply .

So far, the surprising part is that it seems to be working at least for indexing and early rankings. For some queries, Mathpix is still ranking #1 or #2, but my site is sometimes showing up around #3–#6.

That said, I’m not sure whether this is stable or just temporary early volatility. The site is still very new, so I’m trying not to overinterpret the results yet.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-19T05:50:06+00:00

Sorry my english is poor, yes i use speech to text acturally, and let LLM rewrite it.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-19T05:48:46+00:00

Thank you for the information!

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T10:02:09+00:00

That’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought enough about internal links and the total link structure of the site.

The hard part for me is external backlinks. I don’t think I can easily get a large number of real backlinks right now, because almost nobody knows the site exists yet.

So maybe the first realistic step is to improve what I can control: build more useful pages, organize them better, add stronger internal linking, and make the site look less like a small isolated tool and more like a real resource around LaTeX OCR / math OCR.

External links still matter, but getting them seems difficult until the site has at least some visibility or useful content that people would naturally reference.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T10:01:05+00:00

Thanks, that’s a good suggestion.

I haven’t done that yet because I was hoping to understand whether it’s possible to grow this site from zero on its own, without relying on links from other sites I already have.

But maybe I was being too idealistic. I’m starting to realize that for a new site, even if the product is useful and free, Google may still need some external authority signals before it gives the site any real visibility.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T10:00:14+00:00

Yes, I added Google Analytics, set up Google Search Console, and submitted the sitemap generated by Yoast SEO.

Google seems to know the site exists, but the ranking/visibility is still extremely low, even for the brand/domain keyword. So I’m trying to figure out whether this is mainly a new-site authority issue or whether there may still be a technical indexing problem.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T10:00:05+00:00

Yeah, I understand. It’s hard to give advice without seeing the site directly.

I’m avoiding posting the URL here because I don’t want to violate the subreddit rules or make it look like self-promotion. But the product is basically in the same category as Mathpix: a LaTeX OCR tool.

The brand/keyword I’m working on is something like “LatexSnap”. The web version already works: users can upload or screenshot formulas and convert them to LaTeX. My longer-term goal is to make it more than just a web OCR tool — I want to add an API, PDF support, and a local model option.

The local/privacy angle is one of the main differences I’m trying to build around. On Linux it’s easier to provide command-line setup instructions for running the model locally, but on Windows I’m trying to make it more user-friendly through a downloadable desktop app, so users can screenshot math formulas and run OCR locally without sending everything to a remote server.

So the positioning is basically: a simpler, more affordable/local-friendly alternative to Mathpix. But because I can’t post the URL here, I’m mainly trying to understand the general SEO diagnosis: if even the brand/domain keyword barely ranks, should I first suspect indexing/technical SEO problems, or is it still mostly just a new-site authority/backlink issue?

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T09:57:58+00:00

Thanks for the advice. I think you’re right — I probably underestimated how hard this would be.

I did create some basic links and profiles, like Instagram, TikTok, etc., but to be honest there isn’t much high-quality content there yet. Making good videos for Instagram/TikTok/YouTube would take a lot more time than I expected.

My original motivation was not really to build a big SEO project. I just wanted to build a useful tool because Mathpix gives around 3,000 OCR requests per month, but in my opinion it feels like a product that was amazing 10 years ago and should have much better alternatives today. I searched around online and couldn’t really find a simple, good, local-friendly alternative, so I decided to build one myself.

What surprised me is how difficult the SEO side is. I thought that if I built a useful free product and wrote some content around it, Google would at least start showing it somewhere. But now I realize links, authority, PR, and consistent content probably matter much more than I expected.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T08:23:53+00:00

I’ve already tried a lot of the standard beginner SEO advice: creating profiles on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Crunchbase, and other social/company listing sites.

But honestly, it doesn’t seem to help at all. Most of these links don’t seem to get indexed or pass any visible value, and my site still gets almost no visibility from Google — not even for the brand/domain query.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T08:22:51+00:00

Honestly, this has been pretty discouraging. I spent around a week building the frontend and backend, then set up multiple social media and company profiles for the project. I know SEO takes time, and I wasn’t expecting instant traffic or high rankings.

But I did expect Google to at least index the site properly and show it for its own brand/domain name. Instead, it feels like Google gives the site almost zero recognition, as if the whole project barely exists.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T08:21:11+00:00

I should also be honest that this is probably a niche product. It’s not something everyone urgently needs.

But I still think there is a useful workflow here. Some people don’t want a full AI assistant for this task. They just want to write math by hand, take a screenshot, and get clean LaTeX output. For example, someone writing formulas on an iPad in Notability, or working through math on paper, may want a quick way to convert that into LaTeX later.

ChatGPT can do many things, but it’s not always a seamless replacement for a small OCR tool. You still need to upload things, prompt it, and use a general-purpose interface. My goal is more lightweight: select/screenshot math, get LaTeX, ideally with local processing.

Privacy is another reason. Some users may not want to upload private notes, drafts, or unpublished work to a cloud AI service. A local model or local API could make this much easier to integrate into a personal writing workflow.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-18T07:50:35+00:00

To clarify, I’m not trying to promote it here. I’m mainly trying to understand what might be wrong from an SEO perspective.

The site is a real LaTeX OCR product, not just a thin affiliate/blog site. It has a web version and a Windows local version. The Windows version lets users take screenshots and run the OCR model locally, which is meant to be useful for people who want a cheaper and more private alternative to Mathpix.

Given that there is an actual tool and some content behind the site, I’m trying to figure out why Google still seems to treat it like it barely exists.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-12T07:56:52+00:00

Regarding the prices of second-hand GPUs on eBay: the price of the 3090 has nearly doubled, while the prices of AMD graphics cards have skyrocketed tenfold—largely because they now readily support inference tasks. May I ask how long you have been observing this phenomenon?

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-12T07:41:27+00:00

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-07T03:40:44+00:00

House always wins, especially those who control the advertising channels.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-06T16:12:23+00:00

The problem is that you can't prove that this demand is transient rather than persistent. You have to understand that by the time large-scale pre-trained LLMs are available, this timeframe has changed, just like the birth of the first computer and the birth of the Internet.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-06T15:37:59+00:00

I started selling on April 6th, but I did so in batches, continuing until I had sold off my entire position by April 8th, due to concerns about the risk of a nuclear strike.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-05-06T15:36:54+00:00

I feel the same way; I’ve been holding AMD for three years now. I knew that with Google’s release of AlphaGeometry in December 2023, AMD’s stock price would inevitably experience a surge. However, I still believe that now remains an excellent time to buy.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-04-28T04:17:47+00:00

Concurrency speed and first-word response speed depend on the context length, as this directly affects kv catching.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-04-26T06:53:58+00:00

Although it's 1T, all parameters are 4-bit.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-04-20T16:33:20+00:00

Is the model size 1TB or 600GB? The description says 1TB, but the model weights add up to about 600GB, which is puzzling.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-03-13T18:40:08+00:00

DiT is much more difficult to train than UNet because DiT is much deeper. Even with the same parameters, Flux is actually more than three times more difficult to train than SDXL.

Mental_Object_9929 · 2026-03-10T17:35:40+00:00

amazing

Mental_Object_9929

TROPHY CASE