1,292 URLs submitted, 17 impressions: publishing more was the wrong move
https://rankiwiki.com
I run Rankiwiki, a public voting and ranking site. Search Console gave me a blunt result this month: 1,292 URLs submitted, 17 impressions, and 0 clicks in 28 days.
The obvious reaction was to publish more pages. I decided to do the opposite.
- disabled daily trend/news generation
- kept one weekly, draft-first job
- added internal links to three orphaned pages
- kept drafts and suspicious cleanup URLs out of the sitemap
- started improving thin pages manually instead of increasing volume
The useful lesson for me is that sitemap size is an operational metric, not a growth metric. "Submitted" says almost nothing about whether a page is worth indexing or showing.
For people running UGC, directory, or semi-generated sites: what changed first when quality work started paying off: crawl frequency, indexed pages, impressions, or branded searches?
The project is here if context helps: https://rankiwiki.com/
