How I Built a Philippine Tech Blog to 1 Million Monthly Readers (And Then Watched Google Destroy It)

May 22, 2026 · 4:11 AM UTC ·4 min read · 0 reactions · 0 comments · 33 views

TL;DR · WeSearch summary

Luis Reginaldo Medilo shares his journey of building Tech Pilipinas, a tech blog in the Philippines that reached over a million monthly readers. After years of hard work and local specificity, the blog thrived until a Google algorithm update drastically reduced its traffic. Despite the setback, Medilo is focused on rebuilding and adapting to the new challenges.

Key facts

▪Tech Pilipinas was started in a bedroom in the Philippines without funding or a team.
▪The blog peaked at over a million monthly readers before losing 98% of its search traffic due to a Google update.
▪Medilo's focus on local context and specific queries helped the blog gain traction in the early years.

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DEV.to (Top) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 4,924 of its stories.

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Record

Original publisher	DEV.to (Top)
Canonical URL	https://dev.to/loythegreat/how-i-built-a-philippine-tech-blog-to-1-million-monthly-readers-and-then-watched-google-destroy-it-o57
Publication time	Fri, 22 May 2026 04:11:04 +0000
Retrieval time	2026-05-22T04:32:00.252Z
Last seen	2026-05-22T04:32:00.252Z
Headline source	Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite)
Excerpt source	publisher body
Excerpt method	First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited.
Summary	WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer)
Summary source text	contentText
Citation coverage	Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL.
Cluster	Zo9o0oLyI6Rd
Cluster logic	Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison.
Ranking reason	Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking.
Publisher visit	Yes — open original
Substitutes article?	No — link-out required for full text

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Unknown

Retrieval and training permissions are not asserted unless the publisher confirms them.

WeSearch handling by dimension

Indexing	May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)?	Allowed
Snippet	May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown?	Allowed
AI summary	May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article?	Limited
Retrieval / RAG	May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation?	Not asserted
Model training	May the content be used to train AI models?	Not asserted
Commercial reuse	May the content be reused commercially?	Not permitted

Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.

Open original publisher → Source rights JSON → Machine-readable provenance → Rights framework → WESEARCH-STORY-PROVENANCE-V1

Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand

try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3945140) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Luis Reginaldo Medilo Posted on May 22 How I Built a Philippine Tech Blog to 1 Million Monthly Readers (And Then Watched Google Destroy It) #blogging #seo I started Tech Pilipinas in a bedroom in the Philippines more than 8 years ago. No funding, no team, no strategy beyond "I know tech and Filipinos need someone to explain it clearly." At the peak, we hit over a million monthly readers. Then Google ran an update and we lost 98% of our search traffic in a matter of months.

…

Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).

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