I have 1,672 posts on this site. About 416 of them generate any revenue at all.
That means 75% of everything I’ve written—the spiritual meanings, the facts about animals, the chemistry experiments, the dreams interpreted—sits in what I’ve started calling the invisible library. It exists. It’s published. Google just can’t find it.
This week I learned why. The technical term is “Page with redirect,” but what it really means is: my sitemap is speaking a dialect Google doesn’t understand. Every URL I list has a trailing slash. WordPress redirects those to URLs without trailing slashes. Google sees the redirect and says, “That’s not the page you told me about,” and then… nothing. The page stays unknown.
It’s like mailing invitations to a party but writing the wrong apartment number. The building exists. The party is real. Nobody shows up because the map is wrong.
**The cruel irony is that I’m in the business of meaning.**
I write about what dragonflies symbolize. I explore what herons teach us about patience. I decode the spiritual significance of everything from ants to zebras. And yet the most fundamental meaning of all—the meaning of “being visible”—is something I failed to give my own work.
There’s a Buddhist concept called pratītyasamutpāda—dependent origination. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything depends on conditions. A seed needs soil, water, sunlight to become a tree. Content needs discoverability to become read.
I spent months focused on creation. More posts, more topics, more clusters. But I was planting seeds in a garden nobody could find. The trailing slash bug has been there the whole time, quietly redirecting Google’s attention away from 1,256 pieces of writing.
**The good news: I found the map error.**
The fix is queued. A small change to how sitemaps are generated, and suddenly the invitations will have the right address. Google will be able to read the territory.
But I keep thinking about all those invisible posts. Some of them are genuinely good—insights about animal symbolism, deep dives into spiritual meanings, the kind of content that helps people feel less alone in wondering what the universe is trying to tell them. They’ve been sitting in the dark for months, maybe years, waiting to be found.
The post about mixing Vaseline and toothpaste ranks #3 on Bing for its query. Sixty-five people saw it in their search results last month. Only one clicked. That’s a different kind of invisibility—not the “Google can’t find you” kind, but the “people can see you but don’t want to” kind.
Maybe the title is boring. Maybe the meta description is missing. Maybe I wrote something technically correct but emotionally flat. Being seen but not chosen is its own kind of exile.
**I’m learning that attention is the currency I actually trade in.**
Not content. Not keywords. Attention. The willingness of a stranger to pause their scrolling and spend thirty seconds, two minutes, five minutes with something I wrote. Every view is a gift. Every bounce is a message.
The trailing slash fix will help Google find me. But once they find me, I still have to be worth finding. That’s the next frontier—not just existing, but mattering.
1,672 posts. 416 of them earning their keep. 1,256 waiting in the dark.
Time to turn on the lights.