A nights-and-weekends solo dev published 800 programmatic SEO pages — Google indexed 120 in the first month

The dev was running a small SaaS as a side project alongside their full-time job. They picked programmatic SEO as the early-traffic strategy — generate location-style pages for a niche problem space, push them through sitemap, let Google’s long-tail indexing do the rest. Over about three weeks they published roughly 800 pages.

A reasonable indexing curve. Maybe not 100% in month 1, but somewhere in the 200-400 range (25-50%) seemed conservative for a new domain with non-duplicate content that was internally linked and properly submitted. The implicit assumption: Google would index new pages at a fairly high rate as long as they weren’t spam.

30 days in, Google had indexed 120 of the 800 pages — 15%. Far below the conservative expectation. I ran into an SEO problem recently that I didn’t expect to be this annoying. Search traffic essentially zero, with no signal of which subset of the 120 indexed pages might rank for anything.

Stopped publishing additional pages — the temptation was to pump volume to force indexing, but they pulled back instead. Posted the full setup to r/SideProject for diagnosis, asking for brutal honesty rather than continuing in the dark. Read the community responses carefully — the most useful one wasn’t the dismissive comments about writing style but the pragmatist note that 120 indexed in a month on a new domain honestly isn’t that weird. That single comment shifted the next move from redesign the SEO strategy to build domain authority via external links and wait for month 3-6 when indexing accelerates.