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Recent Posts
- Thinking About Switching From WordPress? What Should You Consider Before You Move?
- The Airtable Acquisition Raises a Bigger Question: Do You Really Own the Software Your Business Runs On?
- How to Use Google Search Console’s New Generative AI Data to Improve Your SEO
- How to Update the Same Website Content on Multiple Pages at Once
- Discovered vs. Crawled Not Indexed in Google Search Console: What’s the Difference and How to Fix Each
- The Small Business Guide to Auditing Google Ads and Website Costs
- Do Professional Writers Still Need SEO in the Age of AI?
- Search Engine First vs. People First Content: Why Generic FAQ Dumps Harm Your SEO
- Looking for a Website Builder Without AI? Which One Should You Choose?
- Keyword Cannibalization: How to Find and Fix the Pages Stealing Your Own Google Traffic
- Why Great Content Gets Stuck on Page 8 (And How to Fix It)
- Why MySQL FULLTEXT Search Returns 0 Results (And How to Fix It)
- The Reality of Domain Speculation on New TLD Launches: Is It Still Worth It?
- The Hidden Domain Name Lock-In: Which Registrars Restrict Nameservers?
- Paying $10,000 a Month for SEO? Here’s How to Tell If You’re Getting Your Money’s Worth
- Introducing New WordPress Magazine Layouts in UltimateWB 9 (With Early Access)
- How to Fix the WordPress “Critical Error” on the Widgets Page After a PHP Upgrade
- The Hidden Risk of SaaS Website Builders: Lessons from the Recent Wix Outage
Categories
Tag Archives: sitemap
Discovered vs. Crawled Not Indexed in Google Search Console: What’s the Difference and How to Fix Each
When you log into Google Search Console (GSC) to check your site’s coverage, it can be very frustrating to find your URLs shoved into the "Not Indexed" bucket. But pay close attention to the specific reason GSC provides.
Two of the most common - and easily confused - statuses are "Discovered - currently not indexed" and "Crawled - currently not indexed."
While they might sound like minor variations of the same problem, they point to two completely different stages in
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Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tagged backlinks, crawl budget, crawled - currently not indexed, crawler, currently not indexed, discovered - currently not indexed, discovered vs crawled, domain authority, Google Search Console, Googlebot, gsc, internal linking, internal links, seo, seo missteps, seo tips, sitemap, xml sitemap
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Do Professional Writers Still Need SEO in the Age of AI?
With AI tools flooding the web with generic, automated content, many professional writers are asking the same question: If you have 10+ years of writing experience, do you still need to learn SEO to stay relevant?
The short answer is no - you don't need to become a technical SEO engineer. But you do need to understand content SEO: how people search, what they are actually looking for, and how modern search engines and AI assistants discover and understand
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Posted in AI, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Content
Tagged ai, ai slop, authority, bloat, content seo, core web vitals, crawl budget, fast website, fresh content seo, header tags, javascript, keyword stuffing, schema markup, search intent, seo, site architecture, sitemap, technical seo, third-party plugins, writer, xml, xml sitemap
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Why Google Deindexed 99% of My E-Commerce Site Overnight – And How to Fix “Crawled – Currently Not Indexed”
You log into Google Search Console (GSC) and see a vertical cliff. A WooCommerce (why didn't you use UltimateWB?!) store that held 5,000+ stable product URLs for months is suddenly down to just a handful of indexed pages. Your core catalog is completely gone. At least your homepage is left standing, you say to yourself.
You run the standard technical triage checklist:
- Robots.txt? Clean.
- Noindex tags? None. Everything is set to index, follow.
- Canonical tags? Correct and self-referencing.
Posted in E-commerce, Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tagged 301 redirect, algorithm changes, algorithmic filtering, bloat, bottlenecks, canonical tag, canonical tags, core updates, crawl priorities, crawl stats, crawled, crawled not indexed, database bottlenecks, deindexed, duplicate content, fast website, google algorithm penalties, Google Search Console, Googlebot, gsc, hpos, html, http errors, indexed, indexing, javascript, malware, noindex, noindex tag, pagespeed insights, performance bottlenecks, quality content, rendered html, robots.txt, security flags, seo, server log, site-wide quality signals, sitemap, soft 404, submit sitemap, technical penalty, technical seo, test live url, thin content, time to first byte, ttfb, unique value, url inspection tool, visibility, woocommerce, WordPress
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How to Check Clicks, Impressions, and Rankings for a Specific URL in Google Search Console
There's a little "secret door" inside Google Search Console (GSC) that a surprising number of website owners don't know about.
Most people use Search Console to check whether their pages are indexed, submit sitemaps, or investigate crawl errors. They know where to find the Pages report and the URL Inspection tool. But when it comes to answering one of the
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Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tagged add filter, average position, clicks, crawl errors, Google Search Console, gsc, impressions, indexed, internal links, long-tail keywords, meta description, page stats, seo, site statistics, sitemap, submit sitemap, title, trends, url inspection
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How to Diagnose a Sudden Traffic Drop: The Technical SEO Checklist
A founder or developer logs into their website dashboard, sees a cliff-like drop in the traffic charts, and instantly panics. The immediate accusation almost always targets the exact same phantom: “Google penalized us!”
Before you start ripping apart your content, changing URL structures, or panic-hiring an expensive recovery agency, take a deep breath.
Most sudden traffic drops are not Google penalties. Jumping to conclusions usually leads to changing random SEO settings out of desperation, which can often break a
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Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Website Traffic
Tagged 301 redirect, 404 errors, canonical tags, data tracking glitch, database optimization, disallow, disavow toxic backlinks, email blacklist, google ads, google algorithm penalties, google analytics, google penalties, Google Search Console, Googlebot, gsc, linkedin ads, mail reputation tools, Meta advertising, migration error, MXToolbox, noindex, organic traffic, paid ads, robots.txt, seo, server failure, sitemap, thin content, traffic drop, visbility, xml, xml sitemap
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Why Does Google Search Console Say My Page Is Indexed, But It Won’t Show Up in Google Search?
“Ask David!” question:
I just submitted a new page URL to the Google Search Console URL inspection tool. Pretty fast, within 10 minutes or so, when I checked again, it says that the page is indexed. But if I search for the article in Google - even if I search for the exact URL - it says not found. What is up with that?
David’s Answer:
First of all - good job! You must have written some great content that
... Continue readingWhen Google Search Console “Black-Holes” a Single URL (While New Posts Index Perfectly)
If you log into Google Search Console (GSC) and see that a specific, brand-new blog post is stuck in a ghost state - showing completely undetected, not in the sitemap, and not crawled - it is incredibly frustrating. It feels even more bizarre when you publish a subsequent post right after it, and that newer post indexes completely normally within hours.
If your website layout is clean, fast, and optimized with server-side code (like the UltimateWB integrated WordPress blog system),
... Continue readingWhy Is Google Indexing New Blog Posts So Much Slower in 2026?
“Ask David!” question: "Google used to index my new blog posts faster, what happened?"
If you logged into your Google Search Console this week and saw your brand-new posts sitting in that annoying "Discovered - currently not indexed" status, don't panic. Most likely your website isn't broken, you haven't been blacklisted, and you didn't accidentally flip a "hide from Google" switch.
What you are feeling is a very real, intentional shift in how Google handles the web.
Here is exactly
... Continue readingWhy Have My Indexed Pages on Google Decreased? (Real Causes + Fixes Most Sites Miss)
Seeing your indexed pages drop in Google can feel like your website is quietly disappearing.
One day everything looks stable… the next, your index count is down - and you’re left wondering if your rankings are about to follow.
If you’re asking “Why have my indexed pages on Google decreased?”, here’s the reality:
This is common - but it’s not random.
Google doesn’t just “lose” pages. When your indexed count drops, it’s almost always the result of a decision
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Posted in Ask David!, Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tagged broken links, cannibalization, canonicalization, crawl efficiency, crawlability, crawled, disallow, duplicate content, engagement, google search engine ranking, indexed pages, indexing, internal links, keywords, noindex, noindex tags, not indexed, redirect chains, redirect loops, redirect url, relevance, reliability, robots.txt, search engine optimization, seo, sitemap, slow website, target keywords, thin pages, trust, user intent, wasted crawl budget
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Does “Test Live URL” help Google index your webpage faster?
Does clicking on the "Test Live URL" on Google Search Console after using the "Request Indexing" link make Google index your page sooner? Or was it just a coincidence?
“Ask David” answer: The short answer is no, if you experienced Google indexing your page soon after testing the Live URL, it was just a coincidence. Clicking
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