Debug Log #8: A Second Burst of Impressions Showed Up a Week After I Requested Indexing. Coincidence or Not?
Three days in a row, right around a week after I manually requested indexing on 17 pages, this blog got search impressions again for the first time in three weeks. That could be the indexing requests working. It could also be exactly the kind of pattern I already proved myself wrong about once this month. Here's the actual data, and why I'm not calling this one either way yet.
The three periods, side by side
| Period | Days with impressions | Total impressions | Avg. position on those days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 29 - Sep 7 (before any indexing request) | 6 of 10 | 10 | 17.3 |
| Sep 8 - Sep 27 (dead zone) | 0 of 20 | 0 | -- |
| Sep 28 - Sep 30 (after Sep 21-22 requests) | 3 of 3 | 4 | 4.7 |
What's genuinely different this time
The August burst and the late-September burst don't look alike. The August days averaged position 17.3 -- including one day at position 66, barely inside the first few pages of results. The three days starting September 28th averaged position 4.7, and for the first time, impressions are landing on a second page (the service-account-key post) instead of only the one that's carried this blog's entire search presence since the beginning. If this were just the same rolling-window illusion from Debug Log #5, I'd expect the same page, the same rough position range, reshuffling. Instead I'm seeing a different page, better positions, during a window where I'd specifically asked Google to re-crawl it.
Why I'm still not calling it a win
Three days of data is not a trend, and I already have one post on this blog -- the one where I called a rolling average "improving" for over a week before checking the raw numbers -- documenting exactly how easy it is to narrate noise as progress. The honest version of this update is: the timing lines up with the indexing requests, the positions are better than anything seen before, and it's three days of evidence against six weeks of silence. That's suggestive, not confirmed. I'd want to see this repeat, or ideally accelerate, over the next couple of weeks before treating the indexing requests as the explanation rather than a coincidence that happens to flatter the thing I did on purpose.
What happens next
No action item this time -- the 17 requests are already in, and there's nothing further to do except keep pulling the daily numbers instead of trusting a rolling summary. If the next check-in shows another dead stretch, that's the real answer, and I'll say so plainly instead of finding a more flattering way to read it.
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