My site was indexed on Google for three weeks and ranked for nothing. Every backlink I had was nofollow.

I shipped my portfolio on 23 July. Then I did what everyone tells you to do. I put the link in my Upwork profile. In my GitHub bio. In my LinkedIn. In my X bio. I opened a pull request against emmabostian/developer-portfolios , which is a big curated list of developer sites, and it got merged into the README. Two and a half weeks later I searched my own brand name and got nothing. Not page two. Nothing. The wrong diagnosis My first thought was the obvious one. Google has not crawled it yet. That was wrong, and it cost me a week of looking in the wrong place. I opened Search Console and ran the URL inspection. It came back: URL is on Google Page is indexed Structured data: 1 valid item detected (ProfilePage) The site was indexed the whole time. It ranked number one for site:hecodesforme.com . The search result rendered my exact title, my meta description and my favicon. Nothing about the page was broken, and nothing about it had ever been broken. Indexed and ranking are two different things. I knew that as a sentence. I did not actually believe it until I watched it happen to me. The real reason Google ranks pages partly on links from other sites. A link only passes that signal if it is a normal link. If it carries rel="nofollow" , it tells Google to not pass any ranking credit through it. I went and looked at the actual HTML of every place I had put my link. Every single one was nofollow. Upwork profile: nofollow LinkedIn profile: nofollow X bio: nofollow GitHub profile bio: nofollow That is four out of four, and it is not a bug. Those are all sites with millions of user-editable profile fields. If they passed ranking credit, every one of those fields would be filled with casino spam inside a day. So they nofollow the lot. Correct decision by them, and completely invisible to me until I checked. Then I found the one that actually annoyed me. GitHub wraps links inside README files in nofollow too. So the pull request I wrote, that a maintainer reviewed, that got merg