The problem
A five-month-old WordPress news publisher with 663 published articles, roughly half a million words, a licensed SEO plugin, valid structured data on every page and correct canonicals on every page. One URL was in Google’s index: the homepage. A URL Inspection sample returned 1 indexed, 5 “Crawled – currently not indexed”, and 8 never fetched at all. Twenty-eight days of Search Console showed nine clicks, and of the impressions Google attributed to a named query, most were the owner searching for their own site.
The site had already been through indexing work that treated this as a submission problem. It is not one. Submitting a URL asks Google to look, and Google had already looked: on one article, the same day it was inspected. It looked and declined.
What I did
- Crawled all 699 sitemap URLs at 3 concurrent with a 1-second delay: 100% coverage, zero failures, zero rate-limiting
- Measured content from the WordPress database rather than the rendered page, because the theme’s sidebar and related-post widgets contribute around 79 headings and 295 internal links to every page and would have reported the site as well-structured
- Found the real content position: 543 of 663 posts with no subheading of any kind, 557 with no external source, 455 with no in-body link to another article, all under a single generalist byline
- Binary-searched the real last page of each category archive and proved the paginator counts at 6 posts per page while the loop renders 10, leaving 7 of 7 categories linking to a page that 404s, on the primary crawl path into the whole library
- Traced two conflicting publisher schema blocks declaring different social accounts to one WordPress option that also held the analytics and advertising tags, and wrote the fix in an order that never leaves the dead identity as the only one on the site
- Separated what was measured from what was not: no Core Web Vitals field data exists for the site because traffic is too low to generate a record, and I said so rather than substituting a lab number
- Where a re-measurement disagreed with an earlier pass, reported the less flattering figure with its measurement conditions stated
The evidence
Seven scored categories from three independent sources (a full crawl, direct database queries, and Google’s own Search Console API), with the finding that matters stated plainly: nothing else in the report moves until articles start being kept in the index.