Google indexed 428 of my 1,432 generated pages and none of my 2,290 handwritten ones

I spent yesterday planning to delete the best part of my site.

I run a calculators-and-tools site, solo, five months old. About 5,800 pages across four language sections. Google has 642 of them in its index. Not great. The rest sit in two buckets: 1,153 "crawled, currently not indexed" and 4,161 "discovered, currently not indexed."

Like everyone in that situation, I had a theory. Somewhere in those 5,800 pages I had generated 1,432 timezone pages — every URL a pair of cities, /date-time/time-difference/london-and-buenos-aires, that sort of thing. One calculation, different arguments, spread across a URL space. It looks exactly like what Google's spam policy calls scaled content abuse, and I assumed it was dragging the whole host down. The plan was to collapse them into one hub page and 301 the rest away.

Before doing it, I exported the list of what Google actually has.

The export