Turns out Google hasn’t managed to index my website (🥹), even though it has been more than 6 months since I started blogging! I guess the fact that there are literally 0 external links on the internet that point towards my blog hasn’t helped. I need to get Google’s attention differently.
Here is how new blogs are supposed to help search engines find them (The plan doesn’t include sitting around for 6 months):
- Register for Google Search Console (GSC). It’s a website that allows you to monitor your site’s presence in Google Search results.
- Verify your website with GSC. I had trouble verifying my full domain, so I just verified the domain with a specific prefix: “https://samiulsblog.com”.
- I had already integrated with Google Analytics before, so GSC quickly verified that I owned the domain.
- Now, you have two options:
- Wait for the web crawlers to do their work.
- Or submit a sitemap (an XML file listing all your posts, images, and pages). I chose to do this.
- I already use the Yoast SEO Plugin that generates the sitemap for me at /sitemap_index.xml. I just submitted the link to GSC.
Hopefully, this will help with discovery. Let’s wait for 6 more months and see what happens.