We’ve long suspected that Google’s organic search visibility is determined by how much you spend on paid Google ads. Because of that, we usually include each new product in one of our Google Ads campaigns, even if the budget is small.

One of our best-selling new products is designed for RV service technicians, but we often hear from individual RV owners who, after a brief conversation, probably don’t have the skill to use it. So we created an RV Service Directory https://www.cloghog.com/rv-tank-hydro-jetting-service-directory.php that lists experienced technicians who use our product and agreed to be promoted on our site.

For the first 90 days, we used a free trial of Google Cloud to render the map on that page. During that time, Google Search Console reported the page as “crawled – currently not indexed,” so it never appeared in organic results, despite internal and external links, inclusion in our sitemaps, and what we believe is good SEO content.

Last week the free trial expired and we added a payment method to keep the map live.

Within 24 hours, the page was suddenly indexed and began appearing in search.

That seems like either an amazing coincidence or another example of Google pay-to-play.

And this surprises you why?

And I am not trying to be a smart a** with my response.

Marshall
CENLYT Productions - ms designs
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Not really surprised in hindsight... but for those first 90 days I kept changing the page content, internal and external links, and sitemaps without realizing the page wasn’t suppressed for SEO reasons — Google simply wasn’t getting any money from it yet.

For the less conspiracy-minded, it seems possible that if you embed a Google Cloud resource like a map on your site, the Google crawler might detect that it’s running on a free trial and won't index the page, because it expects the feature to stop working when the trial ends.