A few days after launching a new version of this website, something interesting happened.
Google Search Console began discovering the new pages and successfully re-read the sitemap. Several recently changed pages were also submitted for indexing.
Around the same time, an email arrived from Cloudflare announcing that the website had passed 10,000 page views during the previous month.
For a moment, it looked as though the website had suddenly taken off.
The reality was a little different, but just as interesting.
Although the domain itself had existed for several years, the website had recently been rebuilt from the ground up.
Instead of a handful of static pages, it now contained:
In short, there was suddenly a lot more for search engines to discover and understand.
One common misconception is that clicking “Request Indexing” somehow pushes a website to the top of Google.
It doesn’t.
What it does is effectively tell Google:
“This page has been updated. When you get a chance, could you come and have another look?”
Google still decides whether and when to crawl a page. Requesting indexing can help Google discover that a page has changed, but it doesn’t guarantee an immediate crawl, indexing or a particular position in search results.
The same applies to a sitemap. Submitting one helps Google discover URLs and understand when pages have been added or updated, but appearing in a sitemap doesn’t automatically mean a page will be indexed.
The timing couldn’t have been better.
The email announced that the website had passed 10,000 page views in the previous month.
At first glance, that sounds like thousands of people visiting the website.
But Cloudflare sees traffic at the network level, which can include much more than conventional human website visits.
Search engines, automated crawlers, security scanners and monitoring services all make requests to websites every day. Development and testing can contribute traffic too.
So while the Cloudflare milestone and the renewed Google activity happened around the same time, that doesn’t necessarily mean one caused the other.
And 10,000 page views certainly shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as 10,000 people suddenly discovering the site.
Cloudflare’s analytics are incredibly useful, but it’s important to understand what the numbers represent before drawing conclusions from them.
The notification that started the investigation!
Putting a website online isn’t the end of the process. Search engines continue to revisit websites looking for new and updated content.
A significant rebuild can give search engines quite a lot to rediscover. Google may revisit updated pages, while other search engines and automated tools can also begin crawling publicly available URLs. Security scanners routinely probe websites for common configurations and vulnerabilities, while monitoring services make requests simply to check that sites remain available.
Much of this happens automatically and is one reason server or network analytics can look surprisingly busy even when conventional visitor analytics tell a much quieter story.
The encouraging part is that Google is discovering the site and its new content.
That doesn’t mean the website is suddenly ranking highly, and increased crawling on its own shouldn’t be confused with search success.
What it does mean is that Google has an opportunity to discover and evaluate a website that now contains:
Those things make it easier for search engines to discover, crawl and understand a website. What they decide to index — and where anything eventually ranks — is another matter.
Websites rarely become successful overnight. But the technical foundations matter.
Give search engines a well-structured website, keep improving it, answer real questions, and let the content grow naturally.
There’s no guarantee that doing those things will produce rankings, and a burst of crawler activity isn’t evidence that a website has suddenly become successful.
But it does mean the foundations are there for the content to be discovered and understood.
Ultimately, that was the interesting part of this little experiment. Not the Cloudflare email or the indexing requests, but watching a substantially changed website begin the much longer process of being discovered and understood.