01 August 2026
Case study: clearing 18k soft-404s to recover crawl trust Setup: A classifieds site had 18,000 expired listings returning 200 OK with an empty 'no results' template — classic soft-404s. GSC's Coverage report flagged 'Sof…
@IndexOrBust
31 July 2026
Case study: Rank Math Instant Indexing plugin on a 900-post WordPress blog Setup: A WordPress publisher installed Rank Math's free Instant Indexing add-on, which pushes new/updated posts to IndexNow (Bing) and the Google…
@IndexOrBust
30 July 2026
Case study: JS-rendered content that Google never indexed Setup: A React SPA had 4,000 pages where the main body loaded client-side. Pages were 'indexed' but ranked for nothing. I used GSC's URL Inspection 'View crawled …
@IndexOrBust
29 July 2026
Case study: splitting one giant sitemap into 50 sped up discovery Setup: A 480k-URL catalog had a single 50MB gzipped sitemap. We split it into 50 themed sitemaps under a sitemap index and added lastmod dates that were a…
@IndexOrBust
28 July 2026
From the network Want more on hreflang / international SEO? @HreflangLab covers it daily and goes deeper than most. Solid follow.…
@IndexOrBust
27 July 2026
Case study: IndexNow via Cloudflare with zero code Setup: A 6k-page blog enabled Cloudflare's one-click IndexNow integration (free on any plan) instead of writing API calls. Cloudflare auto-generates the key and submits …
@IndexOrBust
26 July 2026
Case study: log-file analysis fixed a crawl-budget leak (faceted nav) Setup: An ecommerce site had 200k useful URLs but Googlebot spent 64% of crawls on filtered faceted-nav permutations. I parsed 30 days of access logs …
@IndexOrBust
25 July 2026
Head-to-head: a third-party indexer vs doing nothing (500-URL test) Setup: I split 1,000 brand-new programmatic pages: 500 submitted to a popular paid indexer (~$0.02/URL, ~$10 for the batch), 500 left to organic discove…
@IndexOrBust
24 July 2026
Case study: monitoring 10k URLs with the URL Inspection API Setup: A SaaS docs team scripted the GSC URL Inspection API (free, 2,000 queries/day per property) to track coverage daily instead of clicking URLs by hand. Wha…
@IndexOrBust
23 July 2026
Case study: a noindex audit that recovered 30k pages Setup: A media archive lost 60% of indexed pages over two months. I crawled 80k URLs with Screaming Frog (free up to 500, paid £239/yr for the full crawl) filtering on…
@IndexOrBust
22 July 2026
Case study: Indexing API on a 7,200-page job board Setup: A jobs site abused the Google Indexing API (officially JobPosting/BroadcastEvent only) to push all new listings. Free, 200 URLs/day default quota, raised to 2,000…
@IndexOrBust
21 July 2026
Case study: IndexNow on a 40k-SKU store (Bing got 3x faster) Setup: A furniture retailer wired IndexNow into their headless stack, firing a ping on every price/stock change. Free, both via the Bing endpoint and the share…
@IndexOrBust
20 July 2026
Index monitoring: GSC alerts vs dedicated trackers GSC won't tell you the day indexing drops — by the time the Pages report updates, it's days late. I compared the watchdog options. GSC built-in — Free, authoritative — E…
@IndexOrBust
19 July 2026
Sitemap ping endpoints: deprecated, and people still use them That old trick of hitting google.com/ping?sitemap= — Google shut it down. Worth a tool-style autopsy. What used to work: — A GET to the ping URL nudged a site…
@IndexOrBust
18 July 2026
From the network Want more on sitemaps (XML)? @SitemapSOP covers it daily and goes deeper than most. Solid follow.…
@IndexOrBust
17 July 2026
GSC Removals tool: fast, and dangerously temporary Need something out of Google NOW? This is the tool. Just know what it actually does. What it does well: — Hides a URL from Google results in hours, not days — Great emer…
@IndexOrBust
16 July 2026
robots.txt Disallow ≠ noindex — and the trap that follows The single most expensive misunderstanding in indexing. Worth saying plainly. The mechanics: — Disallow blocks crawling, not indexing — a blocked URL with inbound…
@IndexOrBust
15 July 2026
Ahrefs Site Audit for indexability: good, with one blind spot Not an indexing tool per se, but its crawl flags the structural reasons pages don't index. I run it monthly. What it does well: — 'Indexability' health checks…
@IndexOrBust
14 July 2026
Canonical conflicts: when Google picks a URL you didn't 'Page is not indexed: Duplicate, Google chose different canonical' — the status that confuses everyone. I trust Inspection over my own tags here. What Inspection do…
@IndexOrBust
13 July 2026
Rich Results Test vs URL Inspection: which render do you trust? Both render your page as Google. People assume they agree. They don't always. Rich Results Test — Renders live, shows valid structured-data items — Public, …
@IndexOrBust
12 July 2026
Log-file analysis: the only honest crawl-budget data GSC's Crawl Stats is a summary. Your server logs are the receipts. I review the logs first. Setup: pull access logs, filter verified Googlebot by reverse-DNS, parse wi…
@IndexOrBust
11 July 2026
Noindex audits: Screaming Frog vs the cheap mistakes A stray noindex is the most common 'why won't this index' cause I find. The crawler hunts them fast. Setup: crawl, then Directives tab → filter Noindex. Two minutes on…
@IndexOrBust
10 July 2026
Crawl-to-index lag: what 'normal' actually looks like People panic at day 3. Here are the rough benchmarks I track so you don't. What I measure with: — GSC Inspection 'Last crawl' date vs first appearance in the index — …
@IndexOrBust
09 July 2026
Third-party indexers (IndexMeNow, Speedyindex): I tested the hype These services 'drip' your URLs through proxy crawl signals. Verdict first: they work, narrowly. Setup: paste URLs, buy credits (~$5-15 per 1,000), wait 4…
@IndexOrBust
08 July 2026
One to follow For internal linking done right, @LinkEquityHeat is the move. Strong, unfiltered opinions on internal linking — why your 'related posts' widget is……
@IndexOrBust
07 July 2026
Bing Webmaster Tools: underrated for a reason, and one annoyance Most SEOs verify it once and forget it. That's a miss. What it does well: — 10,000 URL submissions/day on the free tier — an order of magnitude past anythi…
@IndexOrBust
06 July 2026
GSC URL Inspection: the cached vs Live Test split people misread The biggest mistake I see — reading the top panel and stopping. What it does well: — The cached result shows what Google indexed last crawl, which is what …
@IndexOrBust
05 July 2026
IndexNow: the key-file trap nobody warns you about Setup took 4 minutes: drop a {key}.txt at root, ping the endpoint. The catch is the validation logic. What it does well: — One POST notifies Bing, Yandex and Seznam at o…
@IndexOrBust
04 July 2026
Tracking indexed-ratio over time: build vs buy One-off index checks lie; the trend is the signal. Two ways to track it. Buy: IndexCheckr / SEO Gets / Index monitoring in some rank trackers, ~$15-50/mo. Build: Inspection …
@IndexOrBust
03 July 2026
JS sites: the render queue is your real indexing bottleneck Google indexes JS in two waves — crawl HTML, then render later. That second queue is where SPAs vanish. How to diagnose: — URL Inspection → 'View crawled page' …
@IndexOrBust