CheckMyTap: 1.6K pages in Google on Apr 26, 2026, 218 on Oct 3, 2026

FTurn every lesson into a systemIts mascot: Glaceon

What's in my city's water, asked for every city

I built CheckMyTap so someone could look up their city's water information, understand what the data could tell them, and choose what to check next.

The more useful test was whether the pages kept showing up for people and whether their claims stayed correct as the catalog grew.

Why local questions deserve their own pages in the first place: why local SEO is underrated.

A large catalog of local pages, guides and tools

I was the site's builder and editor. It grew into a large catalog of local pages, guides and tools, and early indexing made that scale feel promising.

My first written plan, in February 2026, called for about 30 deep pages and said to prove ten city pages before scaling anything. I didn't follow it. About six weeks later the sitemap listed 1.8K URLs, and my note from that day records 583 pages Google had discovered but not indexed. I set 200 thin pages to noindex, which cut the sitemap to 1.6K, and kept building.

The indexing evidence on this page comes from Google Search Console exports. The plan is the site's own planning file, and the sitemap counts come from rebuilding the site at the commits before and after that cleanup.

Google kept fewer of the pages

Same site, same two days: Google's count fell from 1,585 to 218 while Bing's rose from 1,345 to 1,646. I can measure the gap between the two engines; nothing in this data explains it.

Google

Apr 261,585

Oct 3218

Bing

Apr 261,345

Oct 31,646

One block: 100 pages in the index, rounded

Pages in each engine's index for checkmytap.com, on the same two days

Day	Google	Bing
Apr 26, 2026	1,585	1,345
Oct 3, 2026	218	1,646

Google's count dropped 86.2% between the two snapshots. Neither engine's count says why.

Over the 28 days from 2026-09-11 to 2026-10-08, the site showed up in Google results 204 times and got 0 Google clicks. That is one search engine over one month, so it misses anyone who came another way.

I know the result. I do not know one cause.

The loss of indexed pages and clicks is real in these exports. A sitemap or a valid page is no promise that Google will keep it in search. The data here cannot separate demand, content quality, duplication, technical issues or search-system changes into a single explanation.

How I measured it. The two index counts are read off Google Search Console's Page indexing report on two different dates, so they are two snapshots with nothing measured in between. The clicks and impressions are the site's daily totals added up for the 28 days. Neither one says why the pages dropped out. The month-by-month chart below covers Google and Bing clicks for the whole site.

Five audits, and the same errors kept coming back

CheckMyTap went through five audits between February and April 2026, and the same kinds of errors kept coming back. Two problems the audits flagged were on hundreds of pages in July anyway: store prices typed into shopping links, flagged in March and on 1.2K pages, and an energy figure credited to the wrong source, questioned in April and on 656 pages. A third error, a certification claim for a water filter that it doesn't hold, had been live from the site's first import in February 2026, and none of the five audits caught it.

An audit finds a problem once; nothing in it stops the next build from shipping it again. In July I turned each of those error types into a rule the site checks before anything publishes, and a page that breaks one doesn't go out. The day I added the certification rule, it found five more pages that my own cleanup earlier that day had missed. A stricter version, which also holds everything when the check itself crashes, is written but not shipped yet. Until it ships, a broken check can still wave a bad page through.

That mechanism reduces one class of publishing mistakes. It does not verify every possible statement, explain the search decline or prove a recovery.

How I measured it. I rebuilt the site from its last commit before the July cleanup and ran the finished check over every built page, counting each page once per error type. The audit dates and what each one flagged come from the five audit reports; the five extra certification pages come from the commit that fixed them.

I now use checks across my sites for errors like this. I also show what those checks still miss.