Debug Log #6: I Requested Indexing on 17 Pages. Here's What the Daily Data Actually Shows.
For nine days in a row -- September 11th through the 19th -- I told the reader checking in on this blog that Search Console's average position was "improving." 38.5, then 26.7, then 22.2, then 18.2, then 12.8. Every single day I reported it as a real trend. It wasn't one. Pulling the actual day-by-day data instead of the rolling 28-day summary shows something much smaller and much less dramatic than the number I'd been narrating.
What the raw daily numbers actually show
This blog got exactly six days with any search impressions at all between August 25th and September 26th. Every other day in that 33-day window: zero. Not "low" -- zero, no data at all. The six real days:
| Date | Impressions | Position that day |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 29 | 1 | 11.0 |
| Aug 31 | 1 | 66.0 |
| Sep 3 | 1 | 3.0 |
| Sep 5 | 1 | 9.0 |
| Sep 6 | 2 | 10.0 |
| Sep 7 | 4 | 4.8 |
The mistake, stated plainly
The "improving average position" I reported for over a week wasn't new visibility appearing. It was the same six-day burst from late August sliding through a 28-day rolling window, with the worst day in the batch (66.0 on August 31st) gradually aging out of the window while the better days (3.0, 9.0, 10.0, 4.8 in early September) stayed in it longer. The math of a rolling average was doing exactly what rolling averages do -- and I described it as progress anyway, several days running, because the number moved in a direction that felt good to report. It took building the actual daily chart, not just re-running the same 28-day summary query every morning, to see that "improving" and "the same handful of data points reweighting themselves" produce an identical-looking number.
What I did in response: request indexing on the pages that were never in the running
Separately from the position confusion, checking Search Console's Indexing report surfaced the more basic problem: of 24 known URLs, only 3 were actually indexed.
| Status (as of Sep 21) | Pages |
|---|---|
| Indexed | 3 |
| Discovered - not indexed (request submitted) | 17 |
| Duplicate, alternate canonical | 3 |
| Redirect error | 1 |
A page that isn't indexed can't generate an impression no matter what its content is, so I manually requested indexing on all 17 "discovered but not indexed" pages through the URL Inspection tool -- split across two days because of an unofficial daily quota. That part of the plan is sound regardless of the rolling-average mistake. What it hasn't done yet is produce a single new day with impressions since the requests went in.
Where this actually stands
Confirmed: the six-day burst happened, is real, and is documented above from the raw per-day API response. Confirmed: 17 pages were sitting outside the index and now have indexing requests in. Not confirmed: whether those requests produce any new impressions -- as of this writing, every day since September 7th still reads zero. If next week looks like this week, that's the honest result to report, not a reason to describe another rolling-average wobble as a trend.
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