Use case: my own site

The site looked fine. The floor said otherwise.

I ran my own site, homepaintcalculator.com, through the same method I would use for a client. This page shows what I found on the floor, how I sorted every step, and what I built first. It is my site, so it is not a client result.

  • I crawled about 30 pages. I pulled Search Console. I checked what the AI answers say.
  • The site shipped with placeholder content. A 4.9/5 rating from 12,847 reviews. The line “trusted by millions.” Three named testimonials. Star-rating markup on three calculator pages: 4.8 stars, and 2,500 and 50,000 reviews. None of it was real.
  • A find-painters page promised local painters and called them top-rated. There was no directory behind it.
  • An affiliate disclosure page described an affiliate program that was never finished.
  • Analytics was not collecting. The tracking ID was still the placeholder.
  • 13 pages emitted two identical canonical tags. 29 page titles were over 60 characters.
  • Two real calculator pages had almost no text. Google had found them and had not crawled them. Search Console said “Discovered, currently not indexed.”
  • Three cost pages stated prices and accuracy claims that nobody had sourced. They were generated in the code editor.
  • Search Console, index report dated Oct 15: 22 pages indexed and 21 not. Impressions averaged 274 a day over 16 months, and 142 a day over the last 3 months. Clicks averaged 0.76 a day, then 0.15 a day. That is 14 clicks in 3 months. I do not know why. The export does not state its dates, and the day-by-day export is missing.
  • I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini eight buyer questions each, through their APIs, with web search on. 24 answers. The site was cited in 5. Claude 3. Gemini 2. ChatGPT 0. The citations were on the 12x12 room questions, and once on /paint-estimator. On cost and estimate questions, it was cited 0 times in 6 answers.

Ten steps from a crawl to a measurement. The site looked fine. The claims did not.

An illustration from my own site, not a client result.

Delete came first. Three of the ten steps were taking things off the site.

The build

  • Oct 21. I removed the fake ratings and testimonials. I shortened titles.
  • Oct 22. A real analytics ID went on, so there is a baseline from that day.
  • Oct 23. The find-painters page now redirects to my local painter site. The duplicate canonicals are fixed. The affiliate page is removed. It returns 404. The three cost pages are rewritten from three published sources, and each figure is dated. The /paint-estimator text is expanded.

Each batch gets a dated entry. The deploy date comes from the owner, not from when I recommended it.

Measure: a crawl comparison right after each deploy. Search Console at about 2 weeks, around Nov 6, and at 4 to 6 weeks, Nov 20 to Dec 4. The same 24-answer check again in about 2 weeks. The number to beat: /paint-estimator had 6 impressions in the last 3 months.

No results yet.

The gaps

  • I do not know why traffic fell. The rebuild is a suspect. I have not confirmed it.
  • Exact deploy times were not recorded. Only dates.
  • The calculator still shows example prices set in code. They are labeled as examples and are not sourced. The decision is pending.
  • Search Console exports, indexing requests, and the Google AI Overviews and Perplexity checks are still done by hand. The API route needs a Google Cloud service account.
  • I run the crawl, the report, and the AI-answer check myself, on a laptop. They are not scheduled yet.
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