Make your Github homepage (and other pages) appear on Google search
I have been hosting my homepage with github.io for over a year, but recently realized that my homepage never showed up on google search. Even with explicit search terms like “my_name github.io”, Google is only able to return my github profile and my github io repo (which links to source code of the homepage, not the page itself).
I did some investigation and eventually find a way to solve the issue. The following steps can also be used for any websites you manage as well.
First, you need to access Google Search Console (here). Click Start now and select URL prefix.
For URL, enter the root path of your website (username.github.io for example). It will prompt you to verify ownership.
I personally think HTML file verification is the easiest way, but there are some discussion of people unable to verify it this way. For HTML file verification, simply download the file, add it to the root location of your repo (where you have index.html). If you are using git, push the change and wait a few minutes for the change to propagate. Then verify. Once passed, it should redirect you to dashboard of your website.
If for some reason you are unable to verify via HTML file, HTML tag should be the second easiest way to do it. Similar to HTML file method, you will need to modify the source code of he home page, and add a meta tag. Push the change and wait for a few more minutes. You should pass the verification.
Once you pass verification, you should see a dashboard like this
Now click URL inspection or the search bar on the top, and enter the url of your homepage.
Since I already fixed the issue, I’m unable to find a screenshot of the original inspection result. But if your homepage does not show up in Google search, here you should see “URL is not on Google”. And there will be question marks next to coverage and mobile usability. Now click “TEST LIVE URL” on the upper right corner. It basically trial crawl your page and identify if there is any issue. After live test, you are supposed to see all clear results like below:
Now go to “Google index” on the upper right. Note live test is simply a trial test, it does not make Google crawl and index your page. Under Google index, click “Request indexing”. This will send a request for Google to crawl your page and index it. It can take a few hours to a few days to finish the request.
NOTE: there are posts saying you need to upload a sitemap file in order to process crawling and indexing, which is not true. If the structure of your site is not very complicated, the crawler should be able to identify and parse the structure automatically once you request indexing of the root page.
Once the indexing request is processed, all the checks should be green, and your website should be able to show up in search results.
Other notes:
You might see “Crawled — currently not indexed” as the Coverage status. The description of their help article is not very clear. The explanation is “The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.” It gives you an impression of something is wrong. But rest assure, I think in most cases it simply means crawling is finished but the indexing process is not done yet. If there is indeed some errors in your page, you are supposed to see other status indicating what is causing the error. As long as under coverage tab, you see crawl allowed and indexing allowed, you should be good.
If your status is “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag”, you can debug the issue by clicking “View crawled page”, and search ‘noindex’ tag in the source code and resolve the issue correspondingly.
