Why a page isn't showing up in search
When a page doesn't show up in Google, I find out how far it got, from known to shown, and change what that step needs, with my own site's relaunch as the example.
Also in Technical SEO
SEO measurement
If you can't measure it, you're guessing.
Writing on how to read Search Console data, interpret ranking signals, diagnose visibility problems, and separate meaningful patterns from noise in SEO reporting.
The same measurement, run on my own sites in public: the dashboard, month by month.
3 posts
My own numbers, month by month, misses included
Why impressions rise and clicks stay flat
What impressions and clicks can tell you, which explanations need more evidence, and how to choose the next page decision.
Read the articleKeep reading
More on SEO measurement, newest first.
What my dashboard throws out, and how much
Every number on my dashboard is a decision about what to leave out. Here is what gets left out, and how much of it there is.
The worst month for the bug: 12 of RatingPlate's 25 Clarity windows in August 2026 thrown out.
Kept: 13Thrown out: 12
| Kept | 13 |
|---|---|
| Thrown out | 12 |
| All cells | 25 |
| Left out | How much | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Clarity windows a known bug flagged | 96 of 350 windows across 2 months, August 2026 and September 2026 | In a flagged window, a click count equals the session count exactly. The reading figures may be fine, but a row with one broken column isn't trusted for the rest. |
| Direct visits in Google Analytics, September 2026 | 33,839 of 71,281 sessions, 47% | They look like bot traffic: 11% of Direct sessions were engaged, against 59% of every other channel. |
| The current month | 19 days of October 2026: 10,128 Google clicks through and 4,708 Bing clicks through | A month in progress is still settling, and part of a month set beside a whole one reads as a drop. |
Each refusal is counted here instead of hidden.
Clarity through , complete months; Google Analytics 4 through ; Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools daily rows. Clarity covers the sites it records; the other counts cover the same sites as the dashboard's totals.
Measuring SEO with the signals that come before traffic
SEO measurement has a credibility problem. The tools generate enormous amounts of data, but most of it tells you what happened without explaining why.
Rankings and traffic are lagging. They tell you what happened weeks ago. Leading indicators, like index coverage changes, crawl frequency shifts, new query patterns appearing in Search Console, or impression increases for terms you haven't targeted yet, tell you what's about to happen.
From the SEO Measurement page on the old version of this site, first published January 2026.