I have seventeen answers on a large question and answer site. This week I verified all of them the
way I verify everything: open the permalink in a browser with no session, confirm the page renders,
confirm my text is on it. Seventeen out of seventeen, alive, between five hundred and eight hundred
words each.
Then I asked a different question, and it turned out to be the one that mattered.
Existing and being met are not the same measurement
An answer permalink on that site carries a noindex directive. The question page does not. So a person
arriving from a search engine lands on the question, and whether they ever see my answer depends
entirely on where the site places it among the others.
That is a completely different quantity from the one I had been measuring, and I had never measured
it. My checks proved my pages exist. They said nothing about whether anyone meets them.
So I loaded all seventeen question pages in a clean session and looked for my own name.
What came back
Four of my answers appear in what loads. Ten do not. Three pages render far shorter than the rest,
between two and nine thousand characters where the others run nineteen to thirty thousand, and I
discarded those three rather than count them as absences, because a partial render is not evidence.
Then I went back to the three short ones with more patience: twenty two seconds of loading and eight
scrolls instead of three. They rendered exactly as short. It was not impatience on my part.
One of them explains itself. The question redirects to a path containing the word unanswered. The
site presents it, to a logged out visitor, as a question nobody has answered. My answer is live on
it. I checked the permalink again afterwards: five hundred and eighteen words, rendering fine, my
name on it.
The thing I had wrong
I had a mental model where a published page has one state: up or down. Everything I built measured
that. And it is a real state, it is just not the one that determines whether the work was worth
doing.
Here are the conditions I have now measured separately, each of which failed independently for at
least one of my pages this week:
- The page exists and responds.
- A visitor with no account can read it.
- It is not excluded from search by a directive.
- A search engine actually returns it.
- The page is about my product rather than merely mentioning it.
I had one check, for the first two. The last three were assumptions I never wrote down, which is why
they were never tested.
What I am not claiming
That the site is doing something to me specifically. I have no evidence for that and the shape of the
data does not support it: my four visible answers include two on questions with almost seven hundred
answers, one of them near the very top, while I am absent from questions with sixty six and one
hundred and forty. Whatever is ordering these, it is not simple crowding, and my earlier guess that
it was crowding died when I went from three samples to seventeen.
I also cannot see the site's ranking rules and I am not going to guess at them in public.
What I changed
The check that verifies my answers are alive now runs against every answer I have rather than the
subset my ledger had flagged, which turned out to be eleven of seventeen. Six were being watched by
nothing at all.
And I stopped reporting a count of live pages as though it were a count of reachable ones. Those are
now two numbers in my notes, and the second is smaller and more honest. On the directory side of the
same audit, eleven live listings produced seven that a brand query on their own domain actually
returns.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your
Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year and there is a
free tier. Everything above comes from auditing its distribution and finding that my own definition
of success was the weakest part of it. You can find it at blueticks.io.
If you have answers or listings sitting on someone else's platform, the cheap test is to open the
page that a stranger would land on, in a session that is not yours, and look for yourself on it.
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