There wasn't something specific but the combination of many things...
I just kept adding games (each one becomes its own indexable page) while putting real effort into the technical side:
- Clean crawlability (robots.txt + dynamic sitemap)
- Solid site structure and internal linking between games and categories, consistent URL structure, canonical tags
- Unique titles, headings, and on-page structure for every game page
- Schema markup (FAQ, BreadcrumbList, ItemList/Collection, VideoGame where it made sense)
- Page experience / Core Web Vitals so Google could actually rank the pages
technical SEO makes sure Google (and LLMs too) can discover, crawl, understand, and rank those pages efficiently
without the technical work, many of those pages would stay buried
no blog, no content marketing, no hacks
just more pages + a technically sound foundation, then waiting for it to compound.
the domain and the vibe coding trend timing helped a lot too
Makes me wonder how many sites are sitting on similar potential and just need the technical foundation cleaned up!
what made the most impact?