Notes from the barn — week of Sep 21, 2026

Four guides shipped between September 21 and September 27, the catalogue reached 87 workbooks with 39 free calculators, and the site now ranks in Google’s top 100 for 17 keywords — up from 13 a week ago. Nothing is ranking for a head term yet, and this post says so plainly.

What shipped this week

• Sep 21 — What is a good DSCR for a rental property, with the coverage-ratio math written out and a worked example on the Rental Property Deal Analyzer seed figures.
• Sep 22 — Cap rate explained with a worked example, same calculator, different question.
• Sep 23 — Why 40% markup is only 28.6% margin, the one piece of arithmetic that quietly decides whether a job made money. Runs on the markup and landed cost calculator.
• Sep 25 — Plan de negocios: ejemplo con números reales, the Spanish-language lane.

No new workbook or calculator was added this week. And a correction to our own notes from Saturday: the business-plan workbooks were recorded as having picked up verified figures from their test ledgers. They have not. Reading the catalogue again today, 40 of the 41 business-plan workbooks carry no verified figures at all. Until they do, those product pages cannot show the arithmetic the rest of the catalogue shows, and the guides that support them have to borrow their worked examples from a workbook that does.

One thing testing caught

Saturday’s audit swept the whole sitemap rather than a sample: 263 of 263 URLs returned 200, all 87 workbook pages carry exactly one product markup block and zero review markup, and all 39 calculators still carry their “educational estimates only” line. Zero blockers.

The real catch was not a broken page. September 22 was a Tuesday, and Tuesday is the only slot reserved for improving pages that already exist. The day got logged as a Monday, a new guide went out instead, and the refresh slot simply vanished. Two guides have been sitting in the queue since September 19 waiting for it. A calendar typo deleted a whole workday and nothing complained — which is exactly the kind of failure a checklist is supposed to catch and did not.

Where search actually stands

Measure	This week	Last week
Keywords ranking in the top 100	17	13
Best position held	53	53
Keywords lost	0	0
Head calculator terms in the top 100	0 of 6 measured	0 of 8 measured

The four new entries are all cost-to-start questions — lawn mowing, lawn care, landscaping and cleaning — landing between position 53 and 84. Positions in the 50s and 80s earn close to no clicks; they are a sign the pages are being indexed and understood, not a result. The head terms every calculator is aimed at still return nothing of ours in 100 results, five weeks running. Etsy order and view figures are read from the shop API on a different run and are not in this post.

What is next

Tuesday’s refresh slot goes to the two guides that have been waiting in it. After that, the next guide is on writing a standard operating procedure people will actually follow — the biggest clean term left on the calendar at 14,800 US searches a month with low advertiser competition (DataForSEO, measured 2026-09-24), and one where the workbook has 20 verified figures to show instead of advice.