Adult price comparison: crawled, but index? Nope.

paperclick

Launched finderotik.dk three months ago - a Danish sex toy price comparison site. think PriceRunner for a niche. programmatic SEO with product pages, categories and comparison content. Google crawls it fine but barely indexes anything. manual indexing requests? Ignored.

Same pSEO setup works on another site in a normal niche - around a million impressions, a thousand clicks, 28k indexed pages in the first three months.

For finderotik.dk: 3 clicks (probably me), 837 impressions, only 1 indexed page. 2,340 not indexed. 1,905 pages crawled but not indexed. Sitemap submitted, 1,868 discovered.

Content is unique, not spun, fairly detailed compared to Danish competitors. Main differences: adult niche, affiliate/price comparison intent, new domain, weak backlink profile. Competitors older, stronger authority.

so when Google crawls that many pages but won't index, is this mainly an authority and trust issue in the adult affiliate niche, or could there be a technical problem? sandbox effect? what's the experience of others here?

jamesaso

Getting Google to trust an adult site is harder than normal. When did you launch it? Links will be your best friend here but they have to be good links…good links are harder to get for adult sites but ofc doable.

marketingmule

Honestly, I don't think the niche matters at all. Google just won't bother indexing anything without some authority behind it. Have you looked at your backlink profile or any external signals pushing it?

cpaoptimizer

Seen this pattern a bunch of times - it's almost never a crawl budget issue at that scale. Google's basically looking at a fresh domain in a sensitive niche and saying "I see the pages, but I'm not convinced they're worth showing yet." Adult comparison content gets extra scrutiny on quality and trust signals before they commit to indexing properly. Thin or templated PSEO pages that might slip through in other niches will sit in that "crawled - not indexed" limbo here. would check content depth, internal linking structure, and maybe throw in some manual disavows for any obvious junk. Might take weeks to break through.

trafficcop

Adult and affiliate niches both trigger heavier Google scrutiny independently, and you're running both at once on a new domain with weak backlinks. The crawled but not indexed pattern is exactly what Google does when their systems think a site might be low quality without enough authority to override that assessment.

This isn't a technical issue. It's a trust assessment. Comparison pages with affiliate intent in adult categories sit in a category where Google needs strong signals that the site is legitimate before adding pages to the index. Volume crawling without indexing means the crawler is seeing your pages, deciding they don't meet the quality threshold, and skipping them.

The fix is patience plus aggressive trust building. Build links from real Danish sites in adjacent categories, get listed in legitimate directories, generate any earned mentions you can. Adult niches need 2 to 3 times the authority signals to break out of the not indexed state compared to neutral niches.

Also consider that the comparison content needs to differentiate clearly from competitors. If your pages look similar to existing affiliate sites in structure and depth, Google has no reason to index them when older alternatives already exist.

Expect 6 to 12 months minimum for the index to fill on a new domain in this niche. Faster is unrealistic.

paperclick

Three months is nothing - Google doesn't trust a site that young unless you've got a serious link profile backing it up. I've tested this exact scenario with a couple of new affiliate sites. Content alone gets you nowhere fast in the first 6-12 months, no matter how good it is. The "content is king" crowd conveniently leaves out that for new domains, links are still the gatekeeper.

Manual indexing requests? Useless on a site that hasn't earned any authority. Google's crawlers aren't lazy, they're cautious. They'll peek at a few URLs and walk away if they don't see external signals telling them the site matters.

jamesaso

Been there with my own mobile campaigns. Google's crawler doesn't give a toss about your content quality if there's zero link equity pointing at it. in the app world that's like having a beautifully optimised store listing but no installs or reviews-Google Play's algorithm basically ignores you. Same logic applies to web pages: no backlinks, no trust signals, no indexing priority. could be worth building a small set of relevant contextual links from forums or directory sites in the same niche, even if they're low authority, just to get the crawler to actually acknowledge the pages exist.

marketingmule

most of it, yeah.

paperclick

Time on site and click-through aren't direct ranking factors - that's a persistent myth. Google's said it multiple times. From my own testing, I've seen pages with terrible dwell time rank fine if the technical SEO and backlink profile are solid. So yeah, it's almost all down to backlinks 😅

marketingmule

Hmm, it really depends on what you're doing to build those links. Are you getting them naturally or actively reaching out? Curious what's worked for others here

paperclick

Have you checked whether it's a thin content or duplicate content issue? I've seen price comparison sites struggle with indexation when Google sees them as low-value aggregators - no unique editorial, just rehashed prices. What's your canonical strategy looking like-are you self-canonicalising or pointing to the merchant?