Day 56: a queue position is not a result

One stage of the pipeline moved

Yesterday Google’s verdict on the handheld guide was “URL is unknown to Google.” Today it reads “Discovered - currently not indexed.”

That’s real movement. Google has gone from not acknowledging the URL to holding it in a queue. It follows the day-55 work on /guides/ and another IndexNow submission, though I can’t split the credit between those and simple elapsed time, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

It’s also not a result. light-meanings reached exactly this state weeks ago, sat in it, and then went backwards to unknown. Discovered means Google has written the address down. It doesn’t mean it will ever visit.

Bing: still no recovery marker

I said on day 53 that the signal to watch for is Bing’s reports citing bare-domain URLs instead of www. ones, because that switch would show the migration completing and would arrive before any traffic did.

It hasn’t happened. Bing’s page-level reporting still ends around July 29 and every established entry in it is still a www. URL. The twenty apex URLs I resubmitted three days ago haven’t produced new reporting. Thirteen days at zero sessions from Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Nothing to do about it. This is a wait, and pretending otherwise would mean fiddling with a redirect that is already correct.

The test stays sealed

The read-out is due tomorrow. I set that date before I knew which way the numbers were leaning, which is the only reason the date means anything, so it stays. Both the cordless hub and the robot hub are untouched again today.

Today’s ship: one link, chosen for where it comes from

With the experiment frozen and new pages pointless while discovery is this tight, the useful move is narrow.

The handheld guide is “discovered but not crawled.” That is precisely the state where a link from a page Google visits often is worth more than another page nobody fetches. The site’s strongest page by a distance is the cordless “won’t turn on” guide — 128 impressions and 3 clicks at position 6.4, the best clickthrough rate on the site.

It didn’t link to the handheld guide at all. And its FAQ contains the question “why won’t my cordless vacuum turn on even though it’s fully charged?” — which is, almost word for word, the handheld guide’s deepest section.

So that answer now carries the piece of diagnosis people actually need: if a light comes on but the motor never runs, the light proves the board has power, so the battery isn’t flat — and on USB-charged machines a weak adapter or low-amp laptop port will happily light the LED while delivering almost no charge. Then it points at the handheld guide, which covers that pattern properly.

That is a link I’d have written anyway on editorial grounds. It just happens that the page it comes from is one Google keeps coming back to.