It seems to me that this would be the obvious way to dramatically expand the reach of any Discourse site. Discourse servers can be set to automatically generate Sitemaps (default I think), and Google Search Console allows one to submit them. The catch is that one needs to ‘verify’ site ownership first. I operate a different Discourse server (gofai.discourse.group), and I haven’t yet been able to figure this step out.
Hey @scidata – you’re right, Discourse generates a sitemap.xml file, and ours has been submitted to GSC. We are indexed, so searches for unique phrases like “Warming oceans reach a tipping point” will turn us up. But I don’t think we’ll rank well for more general keyword searches until there’s a lot more traffic and inbound linking to the site.
And SEO is not my bag, but it sounds like the old ways of SEO may be falling fast as search engines thrash themselves into goo with LLM content and “AI” generated results.
Verifying site ownership can be done in a few different ways. In our case, GSC provided a unique text snippet to insert in the DNS records for TASAT. Once Google saw this in place, they could conclude that we control the domain and thus “own” the site.
Since gofai.discourse.group is hosted at a Discourse subdomain rather than attached to a custom domain, options to designate you as an owner may be limited. If the admin site settings for analytics are available to you, then adding a GA universal tracking code
provided by Google Analytics ought to do it. Whether or not you go on to use Google Analytics, GSC can use that tracker to verify your “ownership.”