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.…