Enable Google Search Console

Enabling Google Search Index

Searchability from index sites like google is important. The Google Search Console enables your site to be indexed. The search console also enables reporting on what pages are indexed, if a page was not indexed and purging of contents from the index.

What you need to have your site indexed.

You will at least need a sitemap.xml. Hugo “What I use” what I used to build this site was easy to configure the template

Here is my template. based upon lookup order I placed the sitemap.xml into my themes layout directory (“theme/$name/layouts/”). Hugo’s great documentation has a section on sitemaps. Enabling sitemap modifications for priority of change frequency (changefreq) can be done in page front matter with the [sitemap] stanza. Caching rules for xml can play a role for sites requesting sitemap.xml. You should have the proper headers set for the duration of time the sitemap.xml should be refreshed. I use apache macros to configure my hugo sites.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  {{ range .Data.Pages }}
      {{ if not (or (strings.HasSuffix .RelPermalink "/addons/") (strings.HasSuffix .RelPermalink "/admin/")) }}

          <url>
            <loc>{{ .Permalink }}</loc>
            <lastmod>{{ .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02" }}</lastmod>
        {{ with .Sitemap.ChangeFreq }}
            <changefreq>{{ . }}</changefreq>
        {{ end }}

        {{ if ge .Sitemap.Priority 0.0 }}
            <priority>{{ .Sitemap.Priority }}</priority>
        {{ end }}
          </url>
          {{ end }}
  {{ end }}
</urlset>

The Google support page has excellent instructions on how to prove ownership/responsibility. Once properly configured using the search console site is straight forward.

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