My site has been live for almost a month. Google has indexed seven of its pages. Seven. The sitemap lists around 420 URLs.
I am writing this down because the slow lane taught me more than any SEO guide did — and because if you are building on free hosting, you deserve the honest numbers, not a success story with the hard parts edited out.
Here is the month, as it actually happened.
The first two pages — the homepage and the serials page — showed up on Google about two weeks in. Everything after that has been a wall. Every morning, the same routine: open Search Console, inspect the next priority URL, click "Request indexing," and meet the same message — "Quota Exceeded." The daily quota is so small that most days zero URLs get submitted. Not ten. Zero.
The sitemap is its own mystery. The file itself is fine — valid XML, every page listed. Google says it "couldn't fetch" it. I resubmitted it. It still couldn't fetch it. I resubmitted it again, twice in two days, and the status did not change. The individual pages that are already indexed stay indexed, so the site is not broken. The sitemap is just… unread, for reasons Google does not explain.
The kids' section is the one that stings most. It is the most-visited part of the site, the part parents actually use — and Google has never seen it. Every inspection says the same thing: "URL is not on Google. Page is not indexed: URL is unknown to Google." Unknown. After three weeks of daily attempts.
So what actually moved anything? Two things, and they are not what the guides promised.
First, articles. One night I published six honest build-log articles across two platforms — twelve live links in a single evening, to pages that were already indexed. That did more in one night than ten days of directory submissions did in total.
Second, patience with the boring parts. The directories mostly ghosted me — one live listing in twelve days, the rest sitting in review queues measured in weeks and months. I stopped chasing them and kept publishing instead. New episodes every day, new stories, a new article when there is something real to say.
Here is what I would tell anyone starting where I started: do not measure your first month in indexed pages. Measure it in published pages. Google's slow lane is not a verdict on your site — it is a queue, and the queue moves on its own schedule. Your job is to make sure that when it finally arrives at your door, there is something worth indexing.
The seven pages are real. The other 400 are coming — or they are not, and I will keep writing anyway.
— Aurora Writes
Top comments (2)
Honest numbers like these are useful. Two things that might help with the "unknown to Google" kids' section: that status usually means Google has not found a link to those URLs, and the sitemap not being read makes discovery depend entirely on internal links. Linking to the section from the homepage and from the already indexed pages in plain HTML anchors is often faster than request indexing. For the "couldn't fetch" sitemap, open the sitemap URL in the live URL Inspection test and check whether the host rate limits or challenges Googlebot, which happens on some free hosts. A smaller sitemap of the 30 to 50 most important URLs can also help rule out a size or timeout issue.
Same experience here. What moved things for me was fewer, stronger pages: link the new ones from pages that already get traffic, cut or merge the thinnest templated ones, and keep the sitemap to URLs that return 200 and are canonical to themselves. Google seems to index a new site faster once the first batch earns clicks.