I guess WIP are trying to avoid this with the questionnaire upon registration and we can invite people based on that who are likely to be engaged and take part. But once they've signed up I think it's down to WIP to keep them engaged with in product marketing and we've done our bit by vetting the registrations on their behalf!

I've been working with Martijn on this and my initial suggestion was to focus on the creation of new, fresh high quality content - which we are currently working on a plan for.
My hope is those additional positive signals will help Google index us faster, and potentially getting some more authority backlinks would help too.
But there doesn't seem to be a simple explanation for this or any indication from Google on how long this should take.
It does seem to be indexing at a faster rate than the screenshot by @bdlowery below though with a lot less pages, so it does seem to some extent that more pages > more pages being indexed over similar time period.
The joys of historic data.

Thanks, useful to know

Metrics can of course be used, but growth metrics when going by percentage can be more easily swayed. For example I have seen fairly small companies top the finance ratings for the most profitable companies because (in a hypothetical example) their revenue had gone from $1,000 MRR to $100,000 MRR so it was showing a growth of like 10,000% when another company had gone from $1.21bn/mo to $1.22bn a month and because the percentage was so small it was ranking them much lower even though the money change was $10m/mo.
Extreme example but gotta be careful how rankings can be swayed by this and bias given unfairly.

In terms of a panel of judges at no charge, the key is to either:
1) Build a reputable brand that people would be happy to be associated with and share on socials they are judging to improve their profile.
2) Partner with a brand who does not currently do awards but wants to do them - work out the partnership and probably have it the X Awards by X brand, or the X Brand Awards. That way it's much easier to source judges as they want to be associated and you can still do the work on the awards, leverage that audience for entries etc as well and potential sponsors/revenue, split accordingly as per your partnership and probably make more money than you would have going it alone for a lot less work.

This looks like a "pay-to-win" scenario for the awards, where you have to pay to be able to get the higher level rewards.

I've worked on a lot of awards events during my career. The key is to have a non-biased approach to identifying the winners. Whether that's done with a panel of expert industry judges, or through data provided by a large aggregate of users, ie from reviews.

Without that it's difficult to justify the authority around the awards.