I Analyzed 50 Dev.to SEO Articles — Here's What Actually Gets Indexed by Google (2026 Data)

I had a question that nobody seemed to have a real answer for: Why do some Dev.to articles show up on Google's first page — and others, published by the same author on the same platform, disappear completely? Same domain authority. Same DA (Dev.to sits at DA 78+). Same platform rules. But wildly different outcomes. So I did what any SEO-obsessed developer would do: I spent two weeks manually reviewing 50 Dev.to articles tagged #seo and #webdev , checking each one against Google's index using site:dev.to queries and Google Search Console data from my own content. I tracked 11 variables per article. Here's everything I found — including the patterns that will make you rethink how you structure your next post. The setup: what I actually measured Before we get into results, here's exactly what I tracked for each article: Variable Why it matters Title length (characters) Google truncates titles over ~60 chars Primary keyword in title First signal Google reads Word count Depth signal, not a