Dev.to
8/4/2026
How a new domain went from 4 to 115 indexed pages in six weeks — crawl budget, backlinks, and what actually moved
Original: Six weeks ago Google had indexed 4 of my pages. It just hit 115. I changed almost nothing
Short summary
A six-week follow-up on a new domain (tamethebot.com) where Google indexed only 4 of 122 pages. After gaining a single backlink from a blog post and aging six weeks, indexed pages jumped to 115 with the 'Discovered - currently not indexed' bucket cleared. The author admits an IndexNow deploy hook was silently failing and that some 'active users' in analytics were actually datacenter crawler traffic. Google AdSense rejected the same content twice for 'low value content,' highlighting that indexing and monetization have different quality bars.
- •Indexed pages went from 4 to 115 in six weeks with almost no content changes — a single backlink and domain aging likely drove the recovery
- •An IndexNow deploy hook was silently failing for weeks — code that runs without errors and without effect is the hardest bug to catch
- •Crawler traffic from datacenter towns inflated analytics; real human traffic is smaller than raw numbers suggest
Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.
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