Notes from watching the index
Measurements rather than opinion, taken from properties we actually monitor, with the sample size attached. Where a result contradicts something we have said elsewhere, that is the post.
What Google did with a brand new site in its first 24 hours
Sixteen pages, no backlinks, no audience. We recorded what Google reported about every one of them on two consecutive mornings, including the nine we asked it to index and the six we did not.
We checked 70 job postings for Indexing API eligibility
All 46 pages that carried JobPosting markup were valid, across four boards. One major board ships none of it until JavaScript runs. Plus the confident, tidy, completely inverted finding we got first.
What Google's Indexing API actually does with your blog posts
It supports job postings and live events. It accepts every other URL, returns success, and ignores it. No penalty, no effect, and no way for a customer to tell the difference. Sourced to Google's own documentation.
IndexNow does not include Google
Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep receive IndexNow submissions. Google never joined. Why that matters when a tool lists all five engines in one sentence, with a real submission from our own site.
We put a statistic on our own homepage, then took it back down
Our headline number said unlinked pages get indexed far less often. Half the evidence turned out to be circular: a page Google has never crawled reports no links and is not indexed for the same reason. Corrected, the gap collapsed and two of four sites reversed.