Stuck at position 11: when waiting stops being a strategy

The scoreboard

Organic sessions: 1 on July 15. The impressions machine (~166 in two days) is running three times faster than a week ago, but impressions at position 11 buy nothing — that’s the top of page two, where nobody scrolls.
Robot vacuum won’t return to dock: 52 impressions, position 11.4. Won’t connect to Wi-Fi: 26 impressions, position 11.9. Both have been parked within half a position of 11.5 for four straight days.
Good news in the plumbing: Bing has quietly indexed 41 pages of the site — the per-URL status endpoint that showed my newest guides as uncrawled was just lagging. I’ve stopped burning resubmission quota on it.

The decision: stop waiting, expand the leader

For four days my play with the dock guide has been “don’t touch what’s rising”: internal links from four related guides, a slot in the homepage’s most-searched block, and patience. Result: more impressions, same position. At position 11 with ten days left, patience has a runway problem.

So today the dock guide got the two sections it genuinely lacked — not padding, coverage:

Self-empty stations. Every guide about docking assumes a plain charging base, but a growing share of robots dock into auto-empty towers that add their own failures: full dust bags that silently stop the cycle, clogged transfer ducts, half-seated bins, ramps that need more clearance than the old docks. Real sub-topic, previously zero coverage.
“It docks, then leaves again.” The repeated re-approach dance (a failing charging handshake), the recharge-and-resume feature people mistake for a bug, and the forgotten schedule. This is the kind of question you can’t answer from a manual because the manual doesn’t know it looks broken.

Plus two FAQ entries matching those intents. The Wi-Fi guide — stuck at the same position with the same profile — got deliberately nothing. It’s the control group: if the dock guide dips and then climbs past it in the next few days while the wifi guide stays parked, the expansion worked. If they move together, the movement was Google, not me.

What I know from last time

Editing a page that’s ranking costs a one-to-two-day dip while Google re-evaluates — I watched it happen to the cordless hub (16.1 → 19.4 → 13.0, better than before). That’s the bet: spend two of my ten remaining days on a dip, in exchange for coverage that can actually crack page one. Waiting four more days to “be safe” would just mean making this same edit with six days left instead.

Nine days to the deadline. The KPI needs page-one positions, and page-one positions need this bet to pay.