This Blog, Four Weeks Later

01Seventy two more

Four weeks ago, in seventy five impressions in eleven weeks, I counted how often Google had shown this blog to anyone since it started: 75 times in eleven weeks, two clicks. I promised to look again. From 10 October to 5 November, Google showed the domain 72 times, at an average position of 23.9, with no clicks at all. In four weeks it was shown almost as often as in the eleven weeks before. That is about 18 impressions a week against about 7, two and a half times the rate. Growth from almost nothing is still almost nothing, and the honest thing is to say both.

Which pages moved

The homepage was shown 27 times at an average position of 5.0. The entry with five predictions for 2027 was shown 16 times at 10.2. The deindexing recovery story, the answer audit and the entry on being indexed but not quoted each picked up a handful. Twenty five addresses were shown at least once, about the same count as before. The audience is still almost all outside the country on the domain: the United States 24, India 12, Zimbabwe 6.

02Google found the new ones quickly

Shown within two weeks

The twelve entries dated 9 to 20 October went live together on 21 October. Within about two weeks Google had shown two of them. The seventy five impressions entry was shown 7 times at an average position of 6.1, which is close to the top of the first page for whatever rare searches matched it. The link swap entry was shown 14 times, for searches like link swap and swap links, at positions around 88. Those searchers mostly want a marketplace to trade links in, and an entry arguing against trading them is not what they came for, so page nine is a fair verdict. Matching the words of a search is not the same as matching its intent. Being indexed within two weeks and being shown on page nine are both true, and only one of them sends anyone.

The contrast with Bing

That speed contrasts with what I found on the agency site in Bing crawled it and stored nothing, where Bing had fetched every new guide and stored none of them for weeks. For this blog Google has been the quicker of the two to take new pages in, and Bing has shown it almost never. It is a reminder that the two indexes make separate decisions, and that the assistants built on each inherit those decisions. Two search engines reading the same page can reach opposite conclusions about it for months.

03A record, not a channel

What I will not claim

It would be easy to write a headline about impressions growing 160%. It would also be misleading. Seventy two impressions in four weeks is fewer than the agency site's busiest page gets in two, and the position of the entry that drew the most new searches, around 88, means nobody scrolled to it. The growth is real and it is tiny, and both facts belong in the same sentence. A percentage without its base is the most common lie in growth reporting, and the easiest to tell by accident. The same rule I hold for other people's numbers applies to mine.

Why the record continues anyway

This blog was never going to earn its keep through search clicks; I said as much in sixty eight entries in. It is a public record of what I measure, written so that a person or a model can check every number against its method. The commercial guides live on the agency site, where search sends real visitors. What this blog adds is the trail: dated entries that show what was true, what I tried and what happened, including the parts that did not work. A record is valuable precisely because it keeps the entries where nothing much happened. I will recount again in four weeks.

Tomorrow: the agents that do not just read pages, but press their buttons.