> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://seeindie.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I published 263 articles in ten days. Here's what Search Console showed afterwards. - URL: https://seeindie.com/blog/263-articles-ten-days/ - Published: 2026-09-22T11:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-04T20:48:04.000Z - Description: 263 pages in ten days, then average position 18.6 to 32.3. The numbers, the two readings I got wrong, and what Google's docs actually say. - Author: Isabella-Viktoria Quilez - Tags: Project, Build Log, #hub-project Between 30 July and 8 August I put 263 pages live on Crit Pick, my games site. A hundred and four of them went up on a single day. Five weeks later the site's average position had fallen from 18.6 to 32.3 and its clicks had gone from sixteen a month to four. This site, SeeIndie, published 34 articles in the same period and got 29 clicks in the same 28 days. Per article that's a factor of 84 in favour of the smaller site. That's the headline, and the honest thing to say next is that I can't fully explain it. What follows is the whole file: what I published, what the numbers did, the two times I read my own data wrong before I caught it, the confounder I can't subtract, the one thing the data does support — and a cost that none of the metrics show at all. Data through 6 September 2026 · Google Search Console, both properties · Crit Pick is [an SEO case study I run in the open](https://seeindie.com/blog/crit-pick-seo-case-study/) for SeeIndie. Every page named here is live and every number is one you can check. On this page [What I published](#what-i-published) [The numbers](#what-search-console-showed) [Where I got it wrong](#nearly-false) [The field, not the volume](#the-field) [What Google says](#what-google-says) [The bill no metric showed](#the-bill) [Common questions](#faq) The short version - **263 pages in ten days, and 97% of them were one thing.** 256 were Palworld pages, 254 of those a generated creature database. This wasn't a writing sprint. It was a database published as a blog. - **Every metric went the wrong way.** Clicks 16/month to 4, impressions 2,553 to 2,020, click-through 0.6% to 0.2%, average position 18.6 to 32.3, while the stock went from 90 pages to 393. - **I got it wrong twice.** First I called it a downward trend when my window happened to end at the bottom. Then I nearly dated the start of the fall using a two-week average that still contained 217 of the sprint's own pages. - **I can't separate my sprint from Google's.** The August 2026 spam update started on 18 August. The first ten places of the fall were already measured before it. The rest overlaps it. - **What holds up isn't "volume is bad".** It's that volume aimed at an occupied field does nothing. Same site, same ten days, same method: the RimWorld guide ranks 16th; not one Palworld page ranks above 55th. - **The most-repeated explanation for all of it isn't in Google's documentation.** I went and read the documentation. - **And the real bill arrived somewhere I wasn't looking:** 288 of my page titles are pinned to a numbering system the developer has already changed once, without telling anyone. ## What I actually published 263 pages published on Crit Pick between 30 July and 8 August 2026 Ghost admin API, 9 Sep 2026 10 days the sprint ran — 104 pages went live on the biggest single day Own publishing log 4 clicks in the 28 days to 6 September, down from 16 a month Google Search Console 32.3 average position, down from 18.6 across the three months before Google Search Console The sprint ran 30 July to 8 August 2026\. Ten days, 263 pages. [I've said "two weeks" about this before](https://seeindie.com/blog/crit-pick-eight-weeks/) and that was loose: across a full fourteen-day window it's 283, and the tight ten-day count is 263\. Both numbers come out of Ghost's admin API and out of my own publishing log, and the two agree. The shape matters more than the total. The biggest day was 8 August with 104 pages. The second was 4 August with 54\. And 256 of the 263 carried one tag: Palworld. 254 of those were Paldex entries, one page per creature, generated from a data set and published in batches. So this was never "I wrote a lot". It was a database that happened to be shaped like a blog. My rule was, and still is, that [every creature gets its own page](https://seeindie.com/blog/crit-pick-month-two/), because that's how people search: one creature at a time. What I was testing without quite admitting it was whether a two-month-old domain could publish a complete reference for a game and have Google treat it as one. Before the sprint the site had 90 published pages. By 6 September it had 393. ## What Search Console showed Both of my sites over the same 28 days, 10 August to 6 September. | Metric | Crit Pick | SeeIndie | | ---------------------- | --------- | --------- | | Published articles | 393 | 34 | | Clicks | 4 | 29 | | Impressions | 2,020 | 3,070 | | Click-through | 0.2% | 0.9% | | Average position | 32.3 | 24.0 | | Pages with impressions | 215 | 33 | | Referring domains | 1 | 11 | | **Clicks per article** | **0.010** | **0.853** | Same person, same platform, both started in June 2026\. The site with a twelfth of the stock takes seven times the clicks. Crit Pick didn't only underperform the other site, it underperformed itself. Across three months, 7 June to 6 September, it averaged 16 clicks and 2,553 impressions a month at position 18.6\. In the last 28 days of that same stretch: 4 clicks, 2,020 impressions, position 32.3\. The stock more than quadrupled and all four numbers fell. That's where I stopped the first time, and that's where I made my first mistake. ## Where I nearly published something false The comparison above sets a three-month average against a 28-day window. On the strength of it I wrote "the site is in decline". Then I pulled the daily series, blocked it into fortnights, and the shape changed. | Period | Clicks | Impressions | Avg. position | | -------------- | ------ | ----------- | ------------- | | 7–20 Jun | 5 | 397 | 16.6 | | 21 Jun – 4 Jul | 14 | 1,328 | 11.0 | | 5–18 Jul | 14 | 1,459 | 11.6 | | 19 Jul – 1 Aug | 11 | 1,988 | 17.9 | | 2–15 Aug | 1 | 915 | 27.3 | | 16–29 Aug | 0 | 1,017 | 36.5 | | 30 Aug – 6 Sep | 3 | 558 | 29.4 | The collapse is real. The *continuing* decline was not. My 28-day window happened to end at the low point and contained none of the recovery. Over the last eight days the site is seven places better and the clicks are off zero, on essentially unchanged impressions per day: 72.6 in the low window, 69.8 in the recovery one. The movement is coming from positions, not from how often the pages get shown. Eight days and three clicks is a signal, not a result. I'm re-measuring on 23 September, 7 October and 4 November, and publishing whatever it says. The general form of that mistake is worth more than the specific one: **a time window is a selection, and a selection can manufacture a trend that was never there.** Before you claim a direction, look at the daily series, not at two aggregates facing each other. ## The second thing I got wrong, which I caught before publishing this Having found the collapse, I wanted to date it. Google confirmed [an August 2026 spam update](https://seeindie.com/blog/google-update-august-2026/) starting 18 August, running 2 days and 16 hours. If the fall demonstrably started before the 18th, I could rule the update out. So I wrote: the first drop lands in the block from 2 to 15 August, which is after my sprint and before the update. Clean. It isn't clean, and the reason is instructive. **That block still contains 217 of the sprint's 263 pages.** The 2nd to the 8th of August *is* the sprint. A fortnightly average that spans an event can't tell you what happened after the event — and I'd just built a smaller copy of the exact window-selection error I'd caught myself in one section earlier. Here's what survives once I cut what I can't support. The block ending 15 August ends **three days before the update began**, and by then the average position had already gone from 17.9 to 27.3\. So whatever cost the first ten places, it wasn't the August spam update. The second stretch, 27.3 down to 36.5, overlaps the update and I can't assign it. Nor am I claiming causation from two properties, one time period and single-digit clicks: a Google update, seasonality in gaming, or something technical at my end are all still live options. Both mistakes stay in this post deliberately. **If you only ever see the version of an experiment where the analysis worked first time, you're reading marketing.** ## What the data does support: the field, not the volume Strip out everything I can't defend and one finding is left, and it's the useful one. I published into three clusters with the same method in the same window. Where they sit now, from Ubersuggest on 9 September: | Cluster | Page | Keywords it ranks for | Best position | | ------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------- | ------------- | | RimWorld | [rimworld-animals](https://critpick.me/blog/rimworld-animals/?ref=seeindie.com) | 8 | **16** | | Guild Wars 2 | [gw2-find-your-race](https://critpick.me/blog/gw2-find-your-race/?ref=seeindie.com) | 12 | 27 | | Guild Wars 2 | gw2-mesmer | 4 | 32 | | Palworld | jetragon | 1 | 55 | | Palworld | celaray | 1 | 59 | | Palworld | mimog | 1 | 61 | | Palworld | broncherry-aqua | 1 | 66 | Not one Palworld page ranks above 55th, and each ranks for exactly one term. The RimWorld guide ranks for eight and reaches 16th. The Guild Wars 2 page makes the same point without changing the page at all. On "which race should you play", the long-tail terms — 30 searches a month, difficulty in the low twenties — sit at 27th. The head terms on that same page, "guild wars 2 races" at 1,900 a month, sit at 59th and 60th. One page, one crawl, two very different fields. There's a second piece of evidence for this that has nothing to do with Search Console, and I like it better because it comes from a different tool on a different day. When I run a content tool over one of these database terms, the competing results it finds are stores, databases and news items — no prose at all. That's the field. Paldex terms belong to established game wikis with years of links behind them. A three-month-old domain with one referring domain doesn't take that ground by turning up 254 times. Two limits on it, honestly. Four Palworld pages out of 254 is a sample, and not a random one: those four are the only Palworld pages that appear in Ubersuggest's top-pages list for the domain at all, so I checked the most visible ones and they're still on page six. And the tool's coverage is thin at this size — it finds 74 ranking keywords for the whole 393-page site. Strong hint, not proof. ## What Google actually says about "Discovered – currently not indexed" If you read one section, this one. Crit Pick's index report shows 51 pages under "Discovered – currently not indexed", plus five under "Crawled – currently not indexed" where validation has failed. Every SEO write-up I've seen reads a number like that the same way, and so did my own first draft of this post: Google knows about these URLs, Google has decided they aren't worth having, this is what a site gets for publishing at scale without the authority to back it. I went to source that claim in Google's documentation, and it isn't there. Google's definition of the status is: "The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl." That's about serving capacity. It says nothing about quality and nothing about authority. The wording is in the [Search Console page indexing report documentation](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203?ref=seeindie.com). The [crawl budget documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/large-site-managing-crawl-budget?ref=seeindie.com) doesn't rescue the folklore either. Google defines crawl budget as "the set of URLs that Google can and wants to crawl", and says the allocation factors in "things like popularity, overall user value, content uniqueness, and serving capacity". Popularity and uniqueness are in there. The words "quality" and "authority" are not. I'm not telling you the folklore is wrong. I'm telling you it isn't documented, that I repeated it before I checked, and that those are different things. I can report the state of my index report. I can't tell you what Google meant by it. Two more things belong beside that number before anyone quotes it, me included. Of the 124 pages Google isn't indexing, 18 are plain 404s and five are blocked by my own robots.txt — my mess, unrelated to publishing speed, still not cleaned up. And the report covers 492 URLs against 393 published articles, so roughly 99 of them are presumably tag, author and pagination URLs that Ghost generates on its own. Until I've separated those out, "51 pages" isn't purely a content number. While I was in the documentation I read the [spam policy on scaled content abuse](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?ref=seeindie.com) too, since that's the other thing people reach for here. Google's definition: "many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users ... large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it's created." The hinge is purpose, not quantity. I have no manual action and nothing pointing at that policy, so I'm naming it as a hypothesis I checked and set aside, not as a finding. ## The bill that no metric showed me Here's the part I didn't expect to be writing, and it's the one I'd act on first. Palworld's 1.0 release renumbered its entire creature index. That change appeared in **no line of the official patch notes** — it took five independent sources before the finding was solid enough to trust. My database pages carry those numbers in their titles. "Astralym — Palworld Paldeck No. 204". I counted this week: **288 live pages on the site have a Paldeck number in the title.** Think about what that means. A generated database is cheap to publish and it is **not** cheap to own. One undocumented change at the developer's end and hundreds of titles are quietly wrong — no error, no warning, no ranking signal, and the page still looks right. Whether my numbers are the pre-1.0 or post-1.0 set is something I can't currently answer from my own notes, which is itself the answer about how well I was tracking this. That's the real cost of publishing a database as a blog, and it's invisible in every number further up this page. Search Console will never tell you that your titles have gone stale. It has no opinion about it at all. ## The question I haven't answered There's a hole in everything above and I'd rather point at it than have you find it. Every number I've used for the decline is a **property average**. A property average can fall for two entirely different reasons: because the pages that were ranking dropped, or because 256 new pages entered the index below position 55 and pulled the mean down while nothing else moved. The second is arithmetic, not a judgement from Google, and I've been treating them as one thing. The clue I have points the wrong way for me, and I can't use it cleanly. RimWorld animals, the best page on the site, had 992 impressions and 16 clicks in the eight-week cumulative view through 29 July. In the 28 days to 6 September: 203 impressions, zero clicks. Dilution doesn't take clicks off a page that already had them. But one of those is a cumulative view and the other a 28-day window, which is precisely the comparison I spent two sections warning you about, so it's filed as suggestive and nothing more. Settling it needs the daily series for individual pages, not the property total. That's the pull I'm doing on 23 September, and it's the first thing in the next post. ## What I'm doing instead Three things, and none of them is "write more articles". **Cash in the visibility I already have.** The site collects 2,020 impressions a month and converts four. Four pages hold 573 impressions between them and zero clicks — already being served, just too deep. Going from position 32 to position 5 is worth roughly 25 times the current traffic without a single new page. For the version of this problem with no sprint attached, I wrote it up in ["Why your website isn't showing up on Google"](https://seeindie.com/blog/website-not-showing-up-on-google/). **Fix the ratio that caps everything else.** One referring domain against 393 articles. SeeIndie has eleven against 34, and ranks eleven places better. I've spent three months making pages and no time making the case for anyone to link to one, which is an odd allocation for someone who writes about SEO. **Split the database off the blog, and measure it.** On 16 September the generated database moves to its own subdomain, starting with a new game's creature index. The editorial blog stays where it is. Be careful with that last one, because it's the easiest thing here to oversell. **I am not recommending it.** Whether a subdomain is assessed separately from its parent is genuinely contested, and when I went looking for Google's own position I couldn't find one in the primary documentation. What I have is a change, a date, and a commitment to publish the result either way — that's a December post. What I *can* justify without any SEO argument at all is the 288 titles: a generated database and an edited blog have different maintenance shapes, and mixing them means the blog inherits the database's decay. That reason stands up on its own. ## The honest verdict Ten days, 263 pages, and the sharpest thing I can hand you is a caveat: the site got worse on every metric, the trend I first reported was an artefact of how I sliced the data, and half the decline sits on top of a Google update I can't subtract. What's left is still worth the ten days. Volume aimed at a field owned by established sites produced 254 pages ranking for one term each, none above position 55\. The same method aimed at a field nobody had fully answered produced a guide sitting 16th. The variable was never how much I published. It was where — and, as it turns out, what I'd be on the hook to maintain afterwards. Four clicks a month isn't a disaster. It's a data point about a three-month-old domain, which is exactly the age at which everyone else quietly stops publishing their numbers. ## What's next Re-measurements on 23 September, 7 October and 4 November, published here either way. Next time: the page-level daily series that says whether the old pages fell or the new pages just diluted the average, whether the recovery held, and an answer on whether those 288 titles carry the current numbering. In December, the subdomain result. ## Common questions Did publishing 263 pages get the site penalised? There's no evidence of that. No manual action, and Google's scaled content abuse policy turns on the purpose of the pages rather than their number. What I can show is a correlation in time, with a Google spam update sitting in the middle of it that I can't subtract. So was it the spam update or the publishing? Partly answerable. Average position had already fallen from 17.9 to 27.3 in a window ending three days before the update started, so the first stretch isn't the update. The rest overlaps it and I can't assign it. Seasonality and technical causes aren't ruled out either. Does "Discovered – currently not indexed" mean Google thinks my pages are low quality? Google's documentation doesn't say that. It describes rescheduling a crawl to avoid overloading the site. The quality reading is everywhere in SEO writing, including in my own earlier notes, and I couldn't source it to Google. Should I stop publishing a lot? That's not what these numbers show. They show that pages published into a well-covered space did nothing, while the same method in a thinly covered space worked. Check what's already ranking for the terms you're about to write into, before you write 254 pages into them. And check what it will cost you to keep those pages true. Can I check any of this? Please do. Crit Pick is at [critpick.me](https://critpick.me/?ref=seeindie.com), every page named here is public, the totals come from Google Search Console, and the cluster positions come from Ubersuggest on 9 September 2026\. If a number here doesn't match what you can see, tell me. Newsletter ### Follow the experiment The next set of Crit Pick numbers, and whatever I am currently testing. No fluff, no pitch. [Join the list](#/portal/signup) Sources: Google Search Console (clicks, impressions, CTR, average position) for critpick.me and seeindie.com, 28-day view to 6 September 2026 plus the 90-day daily series; Ghost admin API for the publication counts, read 9 September 2026; Ubersuggest for the cluster positions, 9 September 2026; Google Search Console Help (page indexing report), Google Search Central (crawl budget, spam policies) and the [Google Search Status Dashboard](https://status.search.google.com/summary?ref=seeindie.com) for the August 2026 spam update dates.