Notes from the barn — week of Sep 28, 2026

Three guides shipped between September 28 and October 4, the catalogue held at 87 workbooks and 39 free calculators, and the site now ranks in Google’s top 100 for 20 keywords — up from 17 a week ago. Still none of them a head term, and this post says so plainly.

What shipped this week

• Sep 28 — How many jobs a month clears the nut, the break-even formula written out line by line, running on the contractor break-even calculator.
• Sep 30 — Why half your monthly bills is the wrong number, on what 26 paychecks a year actually does to a budget built on 24. Runs on the budget-by-paycheck calculator.
• Oct 2 — SOP template sections and the review math, the part no SOP template explains: what it costs in hours to keep the documents current. Runs on the SOP builder kit calculator.

On Tuesday the roofing startup guide got rewritten rather than replaced — Google had crawled it and declined to index it, so the fix belonged in the page, not in a new one. No new workbook or calculator was added this week.

What testing caught

A link that still works is not the same as a link that still says what you cited it for. Saturday’s audit re-read four external citations instead of just pinging them, and found that the Small Business Administration link inside our Spanish business-plan guide was returning a clean 200 while quietly redirecting away from the section it named. A status-code check cannot see that. The link now points at the live path, and the claim was re-read on the page before the change went out.

The other catch was a guide we did not publish. Friday’s slot was supposed to go to a Spanish page on business-plan examples, but we already own that angle — writing it would have produced a near-duplicate of our own page competing with itself. The slot went to the SOP guide instead.

Where search actually stands

Measure	This week	Last week
Keywords ranking in the top 100	20	17
Best position held	53	53
Head terms in the top 100 (of 8 tracked)	0	0
Workbooks live	87	87
Free calculators live	39	39

Three keywords joined the list this week and none fell off: two variants of cleaning-business startup costs and one more on pressure-washing pricing. All three landed on free pages, not product pages. Six Sundays of measurement now, 39 head-term checks, and the answer has been the same every time — nothing in the top 100 for a term like “net worth calculator” or “markup calculator”. Positions in the 50s and 70s earn close to no clicks. They are a sign the pages are being read by Google, not a sign of traffic, and reporting them as traffic would be a lie.

What is next

The calendar holds 28 measured topics. The next three up, by measured US search volume (DataForSEO keyword_overview, 2026-10-01): emergency fund months of expenses at 6,600 a month, commission on margin versus revenue at 4,400, and a roof pitch factor chart at 3,600. Behind those sits the biggest clean term this site has ever measured — “roof pitch calculator” at 22,200 a month — and it is blocked on building one calculator page, not on writing anything.

Etsy order and view figures are pulled on a different schedule and are not available in this week’s notes.