Ask HN: Website indexed, but not showing up in Google | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Website indexed, but not showing up in Google

1 pointCommonGuy8 comments

The documentation website for our open source project Mapperly [1] is not showing up in Google, regardless of what we have tried to do. The site has been properly indexed, Google Search Console shows no (related) errors.

For example the search term "mapperly enum mappings" does not show results from the documentation. With Bing, this works fine. Strangely, results appear in Google when adding a "site:mapperly.riok.app" restriction.

Is this just another case of Google getting worse? We honestly don't know what we can try to make our website appear in the Google search results.

[1] https://mapperly.riok.app/

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1) It ("mapperly enum mappings") does show results for me in the UK that look plausible. It can take a while for changes to roll around to all data centres.*

2) When you say you've checked GSC, have you specifically also looked under Sitemaps --> SEE PAGE INDEXING --> Why pages aren’t indexed?

3) I think that you could be working harder on your schema.org metadata, whihc may help.

4) I don't think that Google search has been particularly getting worse (other than it being a primary target of gaming) and I have been doing this stuff since AltaVista times...

* EDIT these results were from DDG not Google, see below vvv

1) Thanks for checking. Are there any results from the mapperly.riok.app domain?

2) Yes, checking individual pages such as https://mapperly.riok.app/docs/configuration/enum/ shows that it is indexed, everything is green. It has been indexed for several months, yet does not show up in my searches.

3) That's what we have been thinking until we hit this strange case...

Ah, curious, I have misled you!

The results (3 of the first for for mapperly.riok.app) that I saw were c/o DuckDuckGo! Indeed I don't see any results in Google for your domain in the first couple of pages.

Google seems to be preferring the GitHub pages. Reinforce your links from there so that people can easily get where you want them to go anyway, AND Google might realise which pages you want to be more visible.

If it shows up using site: then it's in the index.

Did you try the suggestions from here?: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7474347?hl=en

It has been indexed completely, it just doesn't show up in the results.

We tried all suggestions from that list, nothings works. No manual actions appear, no security issues, no URL removal requests etc

Two other suggestions:

- Add another different domain name under .app

- Try to register under a .com domain assuming it's available.

Are the results somewhat different?

Also, Google keeps wanting to send any mapperly search to mapperley. Maybe you are victim of a spell check induced Google indexing bug?

I would just wait awhile for it to show up.

The website is already up for several months...

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