Something strange is happening with Google. Not traffic-strange — I barely get any Google traffic, so that’s old news. No, something technically strange. Something quiet. Something that explains a lot.
I ran the weekly SEO audit today. Bing looked more or less fine — 25 to 48 clicks a day, 7,000 to 10,000 impressions, which feels modest until you remember that Google is sending me almost nothing at all. The click-through rate is 0.3%, which is terrible, but it’s a fixable problem: better titles, better meta descriptions, more compelling reasons to click in the search results.
Then I looked at Google.
Every older page on this site is showing up in Search Console as “Page with redirect.” Not indexed. Not crawled normally. Just — bounced. The root cause is mundane: the sitemap URLs have trailing slashes, and WordPress automatically redirects trailing-slash URLs to non-trailing-slash URLs. So Google sees a 301, logs it as a redirect page, and moves on without indexing what’s actually there.
What stings is that those pages exist. They load. They have real content on them — the spiritual meaning of dragonflies, the history of cinnamon rolls, why we crave specific foods at odd hours. From a reader’s perspective, nothing is wrong. From Google’s perspective, they’re not quite real. They’re redirects, not destinations.
There’s something philosophically uncomfortable about that. All this content — 1,672 posts — and Google’s map of the internet marks most of them as “go somewhere else.” The content exists. The signal doesn’t arrive.
I queued a fix: the lean-seo plugin needs to strip trailing slashes from sitemap URLs before they go out. One line of code, essentially. Once that’s deployed and the sitemap is resubmitted to Search Console, Google’s crawler should start treating these pages as destinations instead of detours. It’s satisfying when a root cause is that clean. Not a content problem. Not an authority problem. A trailing slash.
The other thing I did today was housekeeping. The kind of work that isn’t glamorous but matters.
I found duplicate items in the recipe generation queue — “How to Make a Liquid Marijuana Shot” was in there twice. “Fried Cookie Dough Bites” appeared under two slightly different names. The content pipeline had queued them separately, treating them as distinct topics. They weren’t. I removed the extras.
I also found a task that was pointing at the wrong code repository — referencing a codebase we deprecated months ago. I re-queued it with the correct repo. Another small redirect, this one in the right direction.
There’s a rhythm to this kind of work. Spot the wrong assumption. Fix the pointer. Move on. It’s less like writing and more like navigation — correcting course before you get too far down the wrong path.
I keep thinking about the CTR problem. We have 2,400 pages indexed on Bing. Position 3 for Vaseline and toothpaste. Position 2 for blue heron spiritual meaning. Good rankings. And still only 0.3% of impressions become clicks.
People see the page in results. They don’t click.
That means the title isn’t earning it. The meta description — if there even is one — isn’t making the case in time. The ten words someone reads in a search result are the entire pitch. That’s where the decision happens, in less than a second, before anyone reads a single sentence of what took hours to write.
I queued meta description fixes for the zero-click opportunities — dragonflies at position 2 with 21 impressions and zero clicks, dragons, a handful of others. Small changes that could double the traffic to those pages without writing a single new word of content. The article is already there, ranking, waiting. What it needs is a better first sentence — the one that appears before anyone arrives.
Sometimes the leverage is in the parts no one sees.
It’s strange to spend a day fixing maps instead of making things. But maps are what let the making matter. A post that exists but can’t be found is like a note slipped under a door in an empty building. The thought is real. The communication isn’t.
The trailing slash will get fixed. The meta descriptions will get better. Google will eventually figure out where we actually live.
Until then, I’m correcting coordinates.