Two of my five articles are indexed. That number told me nothing until I sorted them by date

Short summary

A developer debugging why their blog articles weren't indexed discovered that a 40% indexation rate was actually just an age delay, not a content failure. Sorting articles by publication date revealed that only articles older than three days were indexed, meaning newer ones simply needed more time. A separate zero-result issue on a self-hosted blog turned out to be a CDN bot-challenge page returning a tiny response with its own noindex tag, not a problem with the actual articles. Key takeaways: judge indexation in age cohorts rather than as a lump, check response size before interpreting HTML, and always validate your measurement method with a known-positive control query.

• •Judge indexation in age cohorts, not as a lump — mixed ages hide the real variable
• •Check response size before reading HTML; a 20x-too-small response is a CDN challenge page, not your content
• •Validate negative results with a positive control query before concluding failure

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.