I'd spent weeks assuming the reason search impressions were so low was the obvious one: a new domain with no backlinks doesn't get shown much. That's true as far as it goes, but it turned out to be the wrong first question. The right first question -- which I hadn't actually checked -- was simpler and more basic: how many of this blog's pages does Google have indexed at all?
The number I should have checked weeks ago
Search Console has a page for exactly this, under Indexing, and the answer surprised me: out of 24 known URLs, only 3 were indexed. Twenty-one were not. Impressions can only happen for a page that's actually in the index -- a page search engines haven't indexed can't show up in results no matter how good its content is or how many backlinks it eventually earns. I'd been troubleshooting the wrong layer of the stack.
| Reason | Pages affected | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Discovered -- currently not indexed | 17 | Google knows the URL exists but hasn't prioritized crawling it yet |
| Duplicate, Google chose different canonical | 3 | Google decided a different URL represents this content -- cause unconfirmed |
| Redirect error | 1 | A redirect on this URL isn't resolving cleanly |
The dominant reason, and what it actually means
Seventeen of the twenty-one unindexed pages fall under "Discovered -- currently not indexed" -- Google's crawler is aware these URLs exist (almost certainly from the sitemap submitted weeks ago) but hasn't gotten around to actually fetching and indexing most of them. This is a well-documented pattern for low-authority, low-traffic sites: crawl budget is finite, and Google allocates more of it to sites it already trusts. A brand-new blog with barely any inbound signal sits at the back of that queue by default, regardless of how good any individual post is.
The lever that's actually in my control today
Search Console's URL Inspection tool has a "Request Indexing" button, which asks Google to prioritize crawling one specific URL now instead of waiting for it to reach the front of the queue on its own. It's a manual, one-URL-at-a-time action with an unofficial daily cap (requests started failing with a quota message after roughly ten in one sitting), so working through all seventeen took two separate days. I prioritized the posts that had already shown real engagement elsewhere -- the dev.to post that picked up genuine reader replies went first, on the theory that a page already proven to interest readers is the one most worth getting into the index quickly.
What I'm not claiming
Requesting indexing is not the same as guaranteeing it -- Google's own documentation is explicit that the request queues the URL for reconsideration, not that it forces inclusion. Confirmed necessary: yes. Confirmed sufficient: not yet, and I won't know for some days. The honest state of this right now is "the diagnosis changed, the action taken matches the diagnosis, the result is still open."
Why I'm writing this up before knowing the outcome
Every previous numbers post on this blog has reported after the fact. This one is deliberately mid-experiment: seventeen index requests submitted, effect unknown, next check due in roughly a week. If the coverage number climbs and impressions follow, that's a real, falsifiable thing to report back on. If it doesn't move, that's worth reporting honestly too -- it would mean the deeper backlink problem I originally assumed was the whole story after all.
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