Articles do not get indexed in the order you publish them. I published the opposite
Earlier this month I published a short piece here arguing that my articles were being indexed in strict order of age, oldest first, with a delay of one to two days. I had five data points, they lined up perfectly, and I said so: the ordering by age is exact, with no exception. I have since tested twenty four articles instead of five. The ordering is not exact. It is not even approximately exact.…
In a recent post, the author claimed that their articles were being indexed in strict order of age, with no exceptions observed in a sample of five articles. However, the author later conducted a test on 24 articles and found that the ordering was not exact, and in fact, changed over time. To test for indexation, the author used a single query per article, specifically the article's title in quotes.
If the page came back on its own title, it was considered indexed. If not, it strongly suggested the page was not indexed. The author then tested 24 articles and found that only 8 came back on their own title. The order of appearance was inconsistent, with some articles appearing on their title at different days. The author then tested the same cohort of articles on two different search engines, Hashnode and Medium.
The results showed that the indexing order was not consistent, and the indexing status of individual articles could change within a short period of time. The author concluded that they should not make any decisions based on a single indexation reading, but rather wait for multiple readings to confirm their findings. In the end, their testing confirmed that Medium did not return any of the tested articles on their own title, while Hashnode did return 4 out of 6. The author has committed to changing their default based on this change in indexing order.
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