591cert is a certification exam-prep website (queries like “azure certification path” rank among its top traffic drivers). This case study reviews the site’s Google Search Console data to understand two things at once: the long-term organic growth story, and a set of technical indexing issues that are currently holding the site back from its full potential.
Unlike a straightforward growth narrative, this audit surfaces a mixed picture — strong historical momentum followed by a recent pullback in clicks, alongside a significant gap between the number of pages Google knows about and the number it actually indexes. The goal of this write-up is to lay out exactly what the data shows and prioritize the fixes with the highest impact.
This SEO audit was carried out by the Times Of SEO team
A Google Search Console Data Review
| 8.51k Total Clicks (3 mo.) | 1.65m Total Impressions | 15.6 Average Position | 0.5% Average CTR |
Click Volume Milestones Over Time
Search Console’s Achievements log shows the site’s 28-day click volume crossing new milestones fairly consistently from 2021 through mid-2025 — but the “in progress” card tells a different story about where things stand right now.
| Milestone | Date Reached |
| 1k clicks / 28 days | 11 Aug 2021 |
| 1.5k clicks / 28 days | 24 Sep 2023 |
| 2k clicks / 28 days | 8 Dec 2023 |
| 2.5k clicks / 28 days | 27 Sep 2024 |
| 3.5k clicks / 28 days | 4 Feb 2025 |
| 5k clicks / 28 days | 12 Apr 2025 |
| 6k clicks / 28 days (peak) | 21 Jul 2025 |
| Current (in progress toward 7k) | 2.55k clicks / 28 days |
| The site peaked at 6,000 clicks/28 days on 21 Jul 2025, but the current 28-day click count has fallen back to roughly 2,550 — a drop of over 55% from the peak. This decline deserves priority investigation. |
Achievements — Growth History & Recent Pullback
Search Console Achievements — climbing from 1k (2021) to a 6k peak (Jul 2025)
The achievements log confirms nearly four years of consistent growth: the site first crossed 1,000 clicks in 28 days back in August 2021, and steadily worked its way up to a peak of 6,000 clicks in 28 days by July 2025. However, the currently “in progress” milestone shows the site sitting at only 2.55k out of a 7k target — meaning recent 28-day click volume has dropped well below the mid-2025 peak. This kind of retreat, after such a long growth run, is usually tied to either a ranking drop, a technical indexing issue, or a seasonal/algorithm shift, and is the first thing worth investigating alongside the indexing data below.
Breadcrumbs — Structured Data Health
Breadcrumbs — 1.08k valid items, 0 invalid, no issues in 90 days
Breadcrumb structured data is in excellent shape: 1,080 valid items with zero invalid entries, and Search Console reports no issues detected in the last 90 days. This is one of the cleanest parts of the site’s technical SEO setup and needs no immediate attention.
Crawl Stats — Server & Crawl Budget
Crawl Stats — 185k total crawl requests across 4 hosts
Over the last 90 days, Googlebot made 185k total crawl requests to 591cert.com and its subdomains, downloading 6.16bn bytes with an average response time of 929ms. The main domain (591cert.com) accounts for the large majority of requests (176,304) with no problems reported. Two things stand out here: first, response time (929ms) is noticeably slower than a healthy edtech benchmark and could be affecting crawl efficiency and user experience alike. Second, the staging subdomain (staging3.591cert.com) received 8,814 crawl requests — a staging environment being crawled this heavily is usually unintentional and worth blocking via robots.txt or noindex to avoid wasting crawl budget and risking duplicate content. By file type, CSS (35%) and HTML (29%) dominate crawl activity, and 88% of crawls are “Refresh” versus 12% “Discovery.
Page Indexing — The Core Issue
Page Indexing — only 3.1k pages indexed vs. 17.1k not indexed (12 reasons)
This is the most important report in the entire audit. Of all known pages, only 3.1k are indexed, while 17.1k — more than 5 times as many — are not. Breaking down the reasons: “Crawled – currently not indexed” is the single largest bucket at 7,564 pages (a Google-systems classification, typically pointing to content quality, thin content, or duplication concerns). Close behind, 3,142 pages are stuck as “Page with redirect,” 2,824 are excluded by a noindex tag, and 2,164 are blocked by robots.txt. Smaller buckets include 404s (713) and pages with a proper canonical pointing elsewhere (589).
| Only about 15% of the site’s known pages are indexed. The three largest blockers — pages stuck after crawling, redirect chains, and noindex tags — together account for over 8,500 pages and represent the single biggest opportunity to grow organic reach. |
Performance on Search Results — Traffic & Rankings
Performance (3 months) — 8.51k clicks, 1.65m impressions, average position 15.6
Over the last 3 months, the site earned 8.51k clicks from 1.65m impressions, at an average position of 15.6 (bottom of page 2) and an average CTR of just 0.5%. The top query, “azure certification path,” alone drove 679 clicks from 15,867 impressions. A position in the mid-teens combined with a sub-1% CTR suggests there’s real headroom to move up in rankings and improve titles/descriptions for the site’s top queries — both of which would compound with fixing the indexing issues above.
Product Snippets — Rich Result Opportunities
Product Snippets — 789 valid items, 0 invalid
All 789 product snippet items are valid with zero critical issues. However, the “Improve item appearance” section flags an easy win: 21 items are missing the ‘aggregateRating’ field and another 21 are missing the ‘review’ field. Adding these fields where genuine ratings/reviews exist would let those items qualify for richer star-rating snippets in search results, which typically improves CTR.
Review Snippets — Structured Data Health
Review Snippets — 768 valid items, 0 invalid, no issues in 90 days
Review snippet markup is fully healthy — 768 valid items, zero invalid, and no issues detected in the last 90 days. Combined with the breadcrumb data, this shows the site’s structured data foundation is solid; the priority fixes lie elsewhere (indexing and crawl configuration, not markup validity).
Robots.txt — Multi-Host Configuration
robots.txt files — fetched successfully across all 6 host/protocol variants
Search Console shows robots.txt being fetched successfully across all host and protocol variants (591cert.com, staging3.591cert.com, software.591cert.com, and both http/https on www.591cert.com), each around 590–821 bytes with no fetch issues. Since a large share of the unindexed pages trace back to robots.txt blocks and the staging subdomain is receiving significant crawl traffic, the actual rules inside these files — especially on the staging and main domains — deserve a line-by-line audit to confirm nothing valuable is being blocked and that staging is properly disallowed.
Sitemap Status
Sitemap — sitemap_index.xml, Status: Success, 2,757 pages discovered
The sitemap index (sitemap_index.xml) was submitted on 7 April 2025 and last read on 1 August 2026, with a “Success” status and 2,757 discovered pages. That number sits well below the 3.1k currently indexed plus 17.1k not indexed (roughly 20.2k known pages total) — meaning Google has discovered thousands of pages through crawling and internal/external links rather than the sitemap. Expanding the sitemap to reflect the site’s full, canonical URL set would give Google clearer priority signals and could help more of the right pages get indexed.
Conclusion
591cert.com has a genuinely strong SEO foundation to build on — four years of consistent growth up to a 6,000-click peak, clean breadcrumb and review structured data, and a healthy crawl relationship with Google (93% OK responses, no host-level problems). But the data also points to two urgent issues sitting side by side: a meaningful recent decline in click volume (down more than half from peak), and a severe indexing gap where only around 15% of known pages are actually indexed.
These two issues are very likely connected. Pages stuck as “crawled but not indexed,” long redirect chains, and a heavily-crawled staging subdomain all point toward technical friction that could be suppressing both the number of indexed pages and the rankings of the pages that are indexed — which would show up exactly as a click decline despite historical strength.
- Top priority: Investigate the 7,564 pages stuck at “Crawled – currently not indexed” — check for thin, duplicate, or low-value content driving this classification.
- Second priority: Audit the 3,142 pages stuck behind redirects and clean up redirect chains; review robots.txt rules given 2,164 pages are blocked there.
- Block or noindex the staging3.591cert.com subdomain — it should not be receiving 8,814 crawl requests or contributing to indexing confusion.
- Quick win: Add ‘aggregateRating’ and ‘review’ fields to the 21 product items missing each, to unlock richer search snippets.
- Once indexing is cleaned up, revisit average position (15.6) and CTR (0.5%) with targeted title/description optimization on top queries like “azure certification path.”
| All data used in this case study was pulled directly from Google Search Console. The full SEO audit was carried out by the Times Of SEO team. |
