Google quietly stopped indexing my blog posts. Here's how I diagnosed it and what I did about it.

I've been publishing reseller content on my SaaS (Underpriced AI) and assumed Google was indexing everything. I was wrong.

Pulled the GSC coverage report this week. 124 posts published. 15 indexed. 59 stuck in "Crawled — currently not indexed." That's Google's polite way of saying "I read this and decided it wasn't worth my index space."

Digging into the patterns:

- 123 of 124 posts had no featured image. Massive Helpful Content signal I was failing.

- Three posts had 100+ em-dashes between them. Classic AI-writing tell.

- Seven posts shared publish dates (legacy from an MDX → DB migration).

Spent a Friday afternoon fixing:

1. Deduped publish timestamps (7 minutes in a script)

2. Stripped em-dashes and "leverage"/"robust" from the worst-offender posts

3. Backfilled images via Pexels + Unsplash APIs for all 123 posts. ~$0 cost, 2 minutes per post

4. Clicked "Validate fix" in Search Console to force a re-crawl

The lesson I'm still learning: Google's Helpful Content era makes quality signals dominant. Timing spreads, images, voice — all of it adds up. An "AI blog farm" (even a modestly-sized one) gets filtered out reliably now.

Will report back in 2 weeks on whether this actually moved the needle.

Building solo at underpricedai.com.