The blog with 600 posts and a 4-post archive
A travel site published for five years, 600 articles deep. Google had indexed about 50. The older posts weren't decaying — they were never discovered at all.
The symptom: deep articles got zero impressions and weren't in the index, yet they were beautifully written and internally 'linked' from the archive page.
The investigation went to that archive. It used infinite scroll: load 12 posts, scroll, fetch 12 more via JavaScript, repeat. There were no real <a href> links to pages 2 through 50 — just a scroll listener appending DOM. Googlebot doesn't scroll a page for thirty seconds, so it saw the first dozen posts and called it a day. The other 588 had no crawlable path.
Turns out infinite scroll is a discovery dead-end unless it's backed by something a crawler can follow.
The fix: keep the infinite scroll for users, but add real paginated URLs — /blog/page/2 through /page/50 — with actual anchor links, and feed every post into the XML sitemap.
Result: indexed posts went from ~50 to 590, and aggregate organic traffic rose +180% across two months as five years of dormant content finally got crawled.
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The blog with 600 posts and a 4-post archive
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