ok so it's been a few days since i submitted the new sitemap.xml via the Google Search Console.
but, of the 3,893 pages that were mentioned there .. only 218 were actually indexed!
uh oh.
Date mismatch?
I noticed the date on the indexing report was before the sitemap submission, so that might have been the reason why. but i couldn't be sure.
I mean, searching on Google for any of the essays that weren't in English didn't turn up anything -- so at least the report seemed to be right.
I needed to do something. But what?
Interlinking posts
I found the solution on Perplexity.
I needed to link the posts together. Right now, I had a bunch of index pages that pointed to "leaf" pages -- but none of the leaves connected to each other.
What I think I needed was pages linking to each other, so that they created more of a cohesive interlinked whole instead of a top-down structure.
Claude code did most of the heavy lifting here, of course. The gist of it is that once we crawl new content, it would identify opportunities to link to other content using an gemini flash 2.5