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Six weeks ago Google had indexed 4 of my pages. It just hit 115. I changed almost nothing
Six weeks ago, the author noted that only 4 out of 122 pages on their new domain, tamethebot.com, were indexed by Google. They attributed this to a crawl-budget limitation on a young domain lacking backlinks, rather than technical issues. A recent update shows a significant improvement, with 115 pages now indexed and only 14 remaining unindexed. The author's initial prediction about the crawl-budget issue proved correct, as the "Discovered - currently not indexed" category dropped to zero.Crucially, almost no changes were made to the website's content during this period; new pages were added at the same rate, and a single experimental "deep" page performed no better than average. The key change that coincided with increased indexing was the publication of the author's previous post, which successfully garnered two dofollow backlinks to the homepage and sitemap. While not definitively provable, this backlink, along with domain aging and regular recrawling, provided Google with a reason to allocate more budget.The author did admit to one technical error: their IndexNow deployment hook was silently failing for weeks, though this did not affect Google's indexing as IndexNow primarily serves Bing and Yandex. The increase in indexed pages has translated into a substantial rise in organic Google sessions, from a small baseline. However, the author cautions that some tracked "active users" are actually data centers, not real humans.In an unexpected turn, while Google's indexer approved the pages, Google AdSense rejected the same content for "low value content" twice. The author acknowledges that the indexer's criteria (is this a real page a searcher might want?) differ from AdSense's (is this a site with enough depth and traffic for an ad business?). The author's next steps involve continuing to write publicly to gain approval from both Google's indexer and AdSense.