More Blog Posts Can Mean Fewer Pages in Google

You were told to blog consistently, and you did. The top pages for "how often should I blog" prescribe volume and never mention that Google can index a post and drop it later.

On a small site, past a ceiling, more posts can mean fewer pages in Google: mine peaked at 128 indexed pages and fell to 119 while I kept publishing every day. Your cadence should follow what your site can make worth keeping, and the calendar comes second.

My blog published daily and Google kept fewer of its pages

I ran johntalaguit.com at one new post a day. I have spent 15 years in SEO, and when the indexed count stalled I opened the Page indexing report in Google Search Console.

Indexed means Google has stored the page and can show it in results. A post outside the index earns zero clicks from Google search, however good it is. As of my 26 September read (report data through 20 September 2026), the count went 106 on 22 July, 116 on 6 August, 122 on 15 August and 127 on 18 August.

It peaked at 128 on 24 August. Then it slid: 126 on 30 August and again on 5 September, 123 on 17 September, 119 on 20 September. Between 24 August and 11 September my live posts rose from 110 to 124. The indexed count never left the 126 to 128 band. Fourteen posts of research, drafting and fact-checking added zero net pages to Google.

By 26 September, 95 of my 131 posts were indexed. Twenty-six carried the status "Crawled - currently not indexed", which Google uses when it has visited a page and chosen not to store it. Seven more showed "Discovered - currently not indexed": Google knows the URL exists and has not visited it yet. That is 33 posts, a quarter of the blog, not eligible to earn search traffic from Google.

Every one of those 26 went live between 26 May and 12 July. Of the 36 posts I published from 20 July to 1 September, 35 are indexed. Google kept almost all of my midsummer posts and let go of my oldest.

These were no throwaway posts. Twenty-one of the 26 had earned Google impressions in the three months before my 26 September read. Google indexed them first, showed them to searchers, and removed them later. A place in the index works like a lease, and Google can end it while you are busy writing the next post.

Overlap shows up in 14 of the 26 losses. Those 14 dropped posts each answered a question another page on my site also answered. In 12 of those 14 overlaps, Google kept one URL per question. Each second answer cost me the same writing time and bought a page Google did not keep.

Search Console showed no manual action. Google's September 2026 spam update ran from 24 September to 8 October, after this data was collected, and I attribute none of these numbers to it. The record is consistent with Google deciding how much of a small, fast-publishing site it wanted to keep.

Page one counts posts and never mentions the index

HubSpot's "How Often Should You (or Your Company) Blog?", updated in May 2025, recommends 6 to 8 posts a month for a blog under a year old. For a complex niche it suggests 2 to 4. The numbers come from the author's experience, and the page publishes no sample behind them.

Tiffani Daniel at Your Creative Content, writing in February 2026, puts her advice in one line:

"I recommend blogging once per week for at least 6 months."

Tiffani Daniel, Your Creative Content, February 2026

A Reddit r/SEO thread goes further and suggests two posts a day for about 45 days. None of the three mentions indexing limits. None mentions Google dropping pages it already indexed.

Owners follow this advice because a post count is easy to buy and easy to check. Your agency can put "8 posts published" on a Friday report and everyone feels productive. Indexed pages live in a report many owners never open. Google controls that number, and it decides whether the posts count at all.

Picture your own business. You run a physiotherapy clinic in Manchester, and your agency agrees to eight posts a month about back pain. By month four, several of those posts answer "how long does sciatica last" in slightly different words. Google picks one to keep. You would have paid for all of them.

The cadence question hides a budget question too. If AI drafts most of your posts now, the hours it saves should go to work your customers and Google can tell apart from everyone else's. I cover which human tactics to re-fund once AI writes the drafts in a separate post. This one is about the ceiling those drafts run into.

Google says it crawls and keeps less of a site it doubts

John Mueller of Google described the mechanism on the Search Off the Record podcast, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable on 16 July 2026.

Read the order of events in that quote. Concerns about the whole site come first. Less crawling follows. Fewer indexed pages come last, under the same two statuses my 33 posts carried. Search Console does not say which reason applied to your site, and it did not say for mine. A run of thin posts can still lower what Google spends on every other page you own.

Mueller also gave the verdict a generic page earns, in his own words:

"Anyone could have written this. This tells me nothing."

John Mueller, Google, Search Off the Record, via Search Engine Roundtable, 16 July 2026

A post that restates the top three results earns that verdict before a single customer reads it. The fix is to require a fact only you can supply before a post gets written, a check I describe in the 10% rule for information gain. A clinic's own waiting-list numbers qualify. A summary of what three other clinics wrote does not.

Google's guidance on generative AI content, updated 1 October 2026, says "It is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing." The same page warns that "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users may violate Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse." If an AI tool writes you a post a day, that is many pages. Each one needs a human fact-check, and those hours are spent before the post earns anything.

Search Console Help describes the status my 26 dropped posts carried:

"It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling."

Google Search Console Help, "Crawled - currently not indexed"

Clicking Request Indexing again and again on a crawled, dropped post burns your afternoon. Google has read the page and made its call. Changing the page, or merging it into a stronger one, gives Google something new to decide on.

Adam Heitzman made the same argument in Search Engine Land on 15 October 2026, in a piece titled "Make every page count before publishing more for SEO." He wrote: "[I]t measures effort, and neither Google nor AI search engines reward effort." His advice for a new idea that overlaps an old page is just as short: "If it describes a page you already have, expand that page instead."

Cut the pace, merge the overlaps, and link from pages Google keeps

Start with a number you can check before any writing budget moves. It takes a few minutes and needs only your Search Console login.

If the Indexed line climbs with each new post, your pace is fine and the checklist further down is all you need. If it is flat or falling, work through the rest in order.

Find the overlaps and merge them. Take the list of "Crawled - currently not indexed" posts and search your own site for another page answering the same question. When you find a pair, fold the useful parts of the weaker post into the stronger one. Then add a 301 redirect, a permanent forwarding address that sends visitors and Google from the old URL to the surviving page. I merged 15 overlapping posts on my site this way.

Merging solves a different problem from refreshing a post that is losing traffic. A refresh wins clicks back on a page Google already keeps. A merge cuts the number of pages asking Google for a place, and hands the survivor everything the weaker page had.

Link every new post from a post Google already indexed. On 26 September I added 23 in-body links from indexed posts and sent 9 URLs through an indexing request in Search Console. Within the hour, 6 were indexed, including two service pages Google had never crawled. For those six, the only barrier was that Google had never scheduled a crawl.

An in-body link costs you a few minutes of editing. It gives Google a path from a page it already keeps to the page you want found. Compare that with the hours a new post takes to research, write and fact-check.

Cut the cadence to what you can make worth keeping. From 28 September I moved this blog from a post a day to three a week. The test for each slot is simple. The post answers a question no other page on the site answers, with something only you can supply. If you cannot fill three slots a week that way, publish one.

If an agency writes your content, you can hand all of this to them and keep one job for yourself. Send them this in writing: "How many of the posts you published for us in the last six months are indexed today? How many answer a question an older page on our site already answers?" A good agency replies with the Page indexing report open. A vague reply tells you what the post count has been buying.

Watch indexed pages against posts live, and stop celebrating the post count

Indexed pages against posts live is the number to read once a month, on the same day, from the Page indexing chart. The Indexed figure includes service and tag pages too. Watch the trend, never the percentage. On my site the indexed count peaked when 110 posts were live. It had fallen to 119 by 20 September while posts kept going live.

Put a price on it. If each post costs an agency fee or a morning of your own time, divide that spend by the pages Google keeps. A ceiling turns every post past it into spend with no page in Google to show for it.

Several numbers look like progress and tell you very little. Posts published per month measures effort, in Heitzman's word. Total impressions can rise from your newest posts while older ones leave the index, and the losses vanish inside the total. Twenty-one of my 26 dropped posts had earned impressions before they went.

A sitemap, the file that lists your URLs for Google, proves you told Google a page exists. It says little about whether Google stored the page. The list under "Why pages aren't indexed" is where the answer lives, post by post.

Judge any change on the trend across several monthly reads, never on one day. My report lagged six days behind the read date. For a single indexing request, check that URL with URL Inspection the next day.

Frequently Asked Questions

I changed my own blog because the record left me no argument. A post a day felt like progress, and Search Console showed Google keeping fewer pages while I kept publishing. If you want a second read of your own Page indexing report before you commission another month of posts, book a call with me and we will go through it together. Your agency reports how many posts went live this month; ask how many of last spring's posts Google still keeps.