Do Google Search Console Reporting Gaps Reveal Its Indexing Speed? An Author’s SEO Diary

Finding clear information on improving a website’s search performance is much harder than it should be.

After considerable searching, much of what I found started to feel dirty—polluted by people who benefit from convincing website owners that something is broken and needs repair by their expertise. A Purchase Now button or Free Trial Offer almost always lives just a scroll away.

I am not an SEO professional. I am a fiction author. I cannot read, write or alter code. I use the ordinary WordPress editor and the settings I understand. I edit my online stories, add links as I go, watch Google Search Console and try to work out what the numbers mean.

Recently, I’ve been restructuring my 1,000-post site to improve its SEO and, hopefully, sell more books. Many say it can’t be done because SEO died somewhere in the last century. I’m hopeful. Using words to sell words sounds like a worthy and noble cause to me.

This business about the GSCs indexing gaps is the first entry in what will become an ongoing diary about the SEO process. It is not a guide written after a triumphant result, because that result hasn’t arrived yet.

To put you in the picture, if it weren’t for a rogue post (or two), my site’s CTR would be a little over 3. It’s 1.56 with those rogues in the mix. Either number isn’t too bad for an author site at the beginning of its SEO work, but it can be much better.

And now let’s talk about those gaps in the indexing reports.

Do GSC Reporting Gaps Give Clues to How Fast a Site Is Being Indexed?

That was one of my first questions because I noticed a growing lag between the date Google’s Page Indexing information and the day the updated report became available to me.

Before I restructured the site, fresh Page Indexing figures often appeared every two or three days. Once the heavy work began, those gaps lengthened. Some reports took nearly two weeks to arrive. I’ve learned the indexing service didn’t stop, but I was surprised by how long it took to hear about it.

It was tempting to believe the delay meant Google had stopped digesting my content for indexing.

The honest answer is no—not exactly. That’s not what was happening. It was indexing pages all along. The date only tells me how fresh the report is, not how quickly Google handled the pages. A page can be crawled, indexed and appear in Search while the larger Page Indexing Report stalls and gives the illusion nothing’s happening.

Admittedly, my site had become a monster. Over the years, it’d become stuffed with thousands of useless URLs.

Writing posts, rewriting them, swapping out images, altering slugs, and testing plugins had left the site bloated with irrelevant URLs. I didn’t know how large the URL list had become until I started reviewing it during the site’s restructuring.

I unveiled a hidden mess. I deleted everything unnecessary. Once that happened, GSC  was presented with a gaping hole in the structure and gave Google a shock.

And it doesn’t just dump URLs because I decided I didn’t want them anymore. It takes time for GSC to let go of what’s been embedded in the site for months and years. I suppose it needs repeated assurances that the URLs won’t be coming back later, ever.

During this part of the restructure, the Page Indexing report suffered a widely reported freeze. From my end, GSC was in a total blackout. It was not sending fresh reports, and I didn’t know what was happening.

The dashboard remained stuck on June data for ages. A fresh report finally became available on 2 July, carrying data through 30 June. Apparently, one of the longest silences I observed was not unique to my website after all.

The longer gaps suggested something was happening, but timing alone doesn’t prove my restructuring work caused them.

Or does it?

I think it does.

This is the sequence I recorded for the arrival of seven recent reports:

Report available	Days since previous report	Google data dated
2 July	17	30 June
15 July	13	10 July
28 July	13	24 July
8 August	11	5 August
10 August	2	7 August
17 August	7	10 August
18 August	1	14 August

Chart 1: GSC Page Indexing report gaps

The report-arrival sequence is 17 → 13 → 13 → 11 → 2 → 7 → 1 day. These are gaps between reports becoming visible, not measured indexing times.

The two-day interval on 10 August was encouraging, although the following gap widened to seven days. Then another report became available on 18 August, only one day after the previous one. That one-day interval was the shortest I had recorded since I began a diary of these gaps (and the greater SEO project).

Another layer of timing comes into play.

The report made available on 17 August contained Google data through 10 August. The report made available the following day contained data through 14 August. In other words, only one day passed between the reports reaching me, but Google’s internal picture advanced by four days.

This is why the reporting gap cannot be used as a stopwatch for indexing speed. It measures how frequently I receive a new snapshot. It does not show how long Google took to process each URL inside it.

It does, however, tell me that the changes I made affected the reporting times. It also points to the next key stage: that I may be coming out of the blackout period. After four months of dark uncertainty, I can see some light ahead.

Reports are landing every couple of days now.

The URL movements also show why I shouldn’t assume a short reporting gap means a small update. The report supplied on 17 August was modest: the indexed total edged from 548 to 549. The next report, supplied on 18 August, was much more substantial. The indexed total rose from 549 to 585. Forty-five URLs entered the index and nine left it. Post-shaped content achieved a net gain of 29 indexed URLs, while the Crawled—currently not indexed bucket fell by another 52.

Google is moving URLs among its categories, shedding some irrelevant ones, including relevant posts in the index and placing others into queues for later attention. Some changes are tiny. Others are not. The reporting cadence and the amount of URL movement do not always match.

How an Author’s Blog Became a Thousand-Post Archive

My website is about fifteen years old, and it grew alongside my work as an author. At its centre is SEETHINGS, my psychological-thriller trilogy. The blog wanders through fiction, relationships, photography, writing, sailing, personal observations and whatever else catches my attention.

Somewhere along the way, I quietly began publishing a blog post each day. I never announced a challenge, built a countdown or made a fuss about it. I did not set out to create a thousand posts either. Then one day I reached that milestone. That was it.

I picked a topic from one of the novel’s pages and expanded on it. It might’ve been a phrase, an intention, or a thought I had while writing it, and I developed it into a full-blown blog post. Once I started doing it, it became easier to find new content to write about.

I am proud of that achievement, but it left me with an old library of dusty books—posts no one was reading. Once published, I shelved and forgot them. The words were available, but their organisation was not.

Some posts found readers anyway. My erotic beach story was already doing well and still does. So was my story about clocks stopping at the time of death and my complaint that the Road Runner narrative is unfair. None belonged to a carefully planned cluster. None relied on a grand internal-link structure. They powered on by themselves.

At one point, the clock story dropped from the index, then suddenly returned. The Road Runner post, which had only a tenuous connection to my core topics, often ranked between positions one and two in Search. It attracted visitors who sometimes wanted something different from what I had written.

Traffic rises, falls and moves around for inexplicable reasons that one chart cannot explain.

The Speed Decision That Doubled My URLs

A few years ago, I became preoccupied with website speed. Mobile performance scores looked important, and mobile website integration wasn’t so great back then. So I installed a plugin that served a faster mobile version of my site’s pages to those people using small devices.

It worked. The metrics were off the scale. Pages loaded so fast that mobile devices didn’t know what hit their browsers. To most people, the website looked the same, just faster. So it did its job.

The Accelerated Mobile Pages plugin did a nasty thing to my URLs. It had created a second set for every post. My attempt to improve a speed measurement effectively doubled the URLs Google had to discover, crawl and classify. It confused GSC, thereby lowering my site’s performance and reducing its chances of being discovered.

Removing the plugin did not make those URLs disappear from Google’s memory. The leftover mobile-page addresses remained in the indexing reports. On a site containing about a thousand posts, that was an extraordinary amount of residue from one well-intentioned decision years beforehand.

I once wrote positively about WordPress AMP and high-speed mobile browsing. I mention it now because this diary should include ideas I later had to reconsider. I chased speed metrics without understanding the extra digi-mechanics it’d bring.

What Changed on 8 April 2026

The restructuring began in April.

First, I removed the old mobile-page duplicates and told Google to stop looking for them. I did the same with thousands of tag and category archives. Apparently, they added little value to ranking (but probably consume bot resources).

Next, I submitted a sitemap compiled by the Yoast plugin, free of those troublesome URLs.

(Yoast includes switches that allow ordinary users like me to include or exclude groups of URLs, such as duplicate pages, from the sitemap.)

Once I had a cleaner-looking file, I handed it over to Google to assess, knowing it would take time to process. While it did that, I went to work on the posts themselves.

I rewrote roughly seventy existing posts during a concentrated two-week period, adding meaningful internal links between related pieces.

This was the largest restructuring work I had ever done. I also mixed writing new material with connecting it to the old. I installed sixteen pillar posts to give the site clear centres of gravity.

Fiction came first, followed by sexless-marriage material, then writing and photography, with personal material sitting further behind. I gathered older posts into topical clusters around those pillars.

That work introduced thousands of new links across the site. Remember, more than a thousand posts need to be realigned with the new pillars. Each came with new links. Each needed matching backlinks. Resetting 70 posts in 14 days is an extraordinary amount of work.

At my current pace, ChatGPT estimates I will be finished in about nine or ten months.

The links were intended to show relationships: a story connected to its theme, an essay to a larger subject and an older observation to a useful destination. A reader arriving on one page would have somewhere sensible to go next.

The most intense stage has passed, and as I mentioned earlier, the reporting frequency has recently increased. I now refresh one existing page each day (hence the 9-10 month finish target), add useful internal links, then return to the relevant pages to create links back. One page a day is manageable and allows me to have a writer’s life and a normal life alongside it.

Google Has Noticed—but Visitor Traffic Has Not Improved

The clearest movement I am seeing is inside the indexing buckets.

On 10 July, the Crawled—currently not indexed bucket contained 1,943 URLs. By Google’s 14 August data snapshot, it contained 1,216. That is a reduction of 727 URLs, or about 37 per cent.

Google data date	Crawled—currently not indexed
10 July	1,943
24 July	1,578
5 August	1,327
7 August	1,306
10 August	1,268
14 August	1,216

Chart 2: Crawled—currently not indexed URLs

The sequence is 1,943 → 1,578 → 1,327 → 1,306 → 1,268 → 1,216. These are Google data dates, not the dates on which the reports arrived.

The total URL inventory has contracted while the indexed headline moved from 491 to 526 and then 563. It later dipped to 548, edged up to 549 and then jumped to 585 in the 14 August data snapshot. The pattern is not a smooth rise, but old debris continues to clear while genuine posts move both into and out of the index.

My understanding, limited as it is, is that if there are fewer irrelevant URLs for Google to process, it can spend more time with the ones that count.

But this is where hopeful interpretations end. There is an uncomfortable result at hand.

I am not seeing an overall increase in visitors.

Not yet.

For the first eight completed days of August, Search Console recorded 350 clicks from 20,828 impressions: a click-through rate of about 1.7 per cent. The latest Performance figures available by 18 August showed no discernible change. The site still receives roughly one hundred visitors a day, with around half arriving from Search. Individual pages and indexing buckets are moving, but the overall traffic line has not produced the improvement I expected.

Book sales have not shown a lift either.

Still, selling fiction is the reason this website exists. Indexing is meant to bring more relevant readers—or help more of them discover my books. It’s not a complete success yet. Time will tell.

Google says some improvements may show results within days, while others can take several months, with no guarantees. That is not the tidy answer an impatient website owner wants, but it is more honest than many sales pages that want money upfront regardless of outcomes.

What I Am Watching Next

For now, I have evidence that Google is reclassifying the website. That part is certain. I do not yet have evidence that the new structure is increasing traffic or selling books.

Side note: Traffic did not decline at any time during the restructuring work. It remained steady throughout.

Over the coming months, I will keep recording:

• how often the Page Indexing report updates;
• indexed and non-indexed URL totals;
• clicks, impressions and click-through rate;
• changes to individual posts rather than only the site-wide average;
• daily visitors and the proportion arriving from Search; and
• book sales, without pretending that every purchase began with Google.

I will continue refreshing and linking one page a day (which usually entails editing up to eight others). That is closer to editing a manuscript than writing code: decide where a piece belongs, strengthen its connection to the surrounding material and remove distractions.

Perhaps traffic will rise in weeks. Perhaps it will take months. Perhaps the cleanup will not produce the growth I hoped for. Any outcome I find will belong in this diary.

Right now, Google appears to have noticed that all the furniture has been moved. Whether it intends to send more visitors through the front door remains to be seen.

I will watch the numbers, keep doing the daily work and report what happens next.

Let’s see how this goes.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)