Submitting a Website to Google Search Console
After finishing the website's basic SEO setup, the next step is to submit it to Google Search Console so Google knows the site exists.
Submission steps
- Go to Google Search Console.
- When adding a property, choose “Domain” and enter your domain name, such as
inn666.dev, withouthttps://. - Follow the instructions to verify domain ownership. If the domain is managed through Cloudflare, you can complete the verification directly through Cloudflare.
- After verification, open the Google Search Console dashboard and click “Sitemaps” in the left sidebar.
- Enter the full sitemap URL, such as
https://inn666.dev/sitemap.xml, and click “Submit.” - If entering only
sitemap.xmlcauses the domain property to show an “Invalid sitemap URL” message, use the full URL instead. - Google will schedule its own checks before adding pages to the search index. When the site is new, you can also use “URL inspection” at the top, enter a full URL such as
https://inn666.dev/zh/, and ask Google to prioritize checking it. - After the inspection finishes, click “Request indexing.”
After publishing new articles
You only need to submit the sitemap once. There is no need to submit it again every time you publish a new article.
When the site is deployed again, VitePress automatically updates sitemap.xml. Google also returns periodically to read the sitemap and discover new or updated articles.
You do not need to click “Request indexing” for every article either. It only asks Google to prioritize checking a specific URL again and does not guarantee immediate indexing. Use it when you want an important article to be discovered sooner, or when an article still has not been indexed after being published for a while.
Conclusion
Once domain verification is complete, the sitemap is submitted, and the homepage is optionally requested for indexing, the basic setup is done. From there, just keep publishing normally and let Google handle its periodic checks.
English translation provided by Codex.