Google Search Console

  • What: Google’s tool for seeing how the site is indexed. https://search.google.com/search-console
  • Property: Domain property josephinealinea.dev.
  • Auth / verification: DNS TXT record at the DNS provider: Type TXT, Name @, value google-site-verification=... (the value comes from Search Console). Keep the record in place, or verification lapses. Keep the existing GitHub Pages A and CNAME records.
  • Called from: nothing in the repo calls it; Google crawls the site. No visitor data is collected by the site for this.
  • Sitemap: https://josephinealinea.dev/sitemap.xml, generated at build time by jekyll-sitemap and listed in robots.txt. Submit it once under Indexing, Sitemaps; Google re-reads it on its own.
  • Indexing requests: done by hand with URL Inspection, Request indexing, for a few key pages. Limited to a handful per day.
  • Custom domain: GitHub Settings, Pages: custom domain josephinealinea.dev, Enforce HTTPS on. CNAME in the repo root must match. url in _config.yml must also be https://josephinealinea.dev, or canonical and Open Graph URLs point at the wrong host.
  • Failure: if the TXT record is removed the property becomes unverified; a missing or erroring sitemap shows as “Couldn’t fetch” under Sitemaps.
  • Quirks: HTTPS enforcement can stay greyed out for a while after DNS changes. Pages excluded from the sitemap use sitemap: false in their front matter.