Prove the site is ours, with a file rather than a tag - #63
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Google Search Console will not report on a property it cannot verify, and the site has never been registered — which is also why there is no way to ask for the landing page to be indexed. The proof is a file at the site root rather than a meta tag in the landing page's head. Both are offered and both work, but the head is rewritten every release, and a tag living there is the kind of thing a rewrite drops in silence; Search Console re-checks periodically and un-verifies when the proof stops answering. A file nothing links to is not in anyone's way. It only counts once it is live, and pages.yml deploys on dispatch only, so this has to be merged and deployed before the check is run. main's site/ is byte-identical to what is serving now, so that deploy publishes this file and nothing else.
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The landing page does not turn up in a search, and the first question was
whether the site was blocking crawlers. It is not: no
robots.txtat eitherlevel (the project path and
temoki.github.ioboth 404), nonoindex, noX-Robots-Tagfrom GitHub Pages, public repository, 200 OK. It has simplynever been registered anywhere, so there is no way to see what Google thinks
of it and no way to ask for it to be indexed.
Google Search Console needs proof of ownership before it will report on a
property. A domain property is not available — that wants DNS for
github.io— so this is a URL-prefix property for
https://temoki.github.io/TortoiseBlocks/,and the proof is the file added here.
Why the file and not the
<meta name="google-site-verification">tag.Both are offered and both work. But the tag would live in the landing page's
<head>, which is rewritten every release — 1.1.0 alone moved the title, theOG description and the feature list — and a single unexplained line in there is
what a rewrite drops in silence. Search Console re-checks periodically and
un-verifies when the proof stops answering, so the failure would show up as
reports that quietly stopped. A file nothing links to survives all of that and
is in nobody's way. Its opacity is the one real cost, so
release/SKILL.mdnow says what it is and that it must not be tidied, renamed or wrapped in HTML:
the check reads the contents, and the filename has to match what is inside.
This has to be deployed before the check is run.
pages.ymlisworkflow_dispatchonly, so merging does not publish it; the sequence ismerge, run the workflow against main, confirm the URL answers, and only then
press verify in Search Console. main's
site/is byte-identical to what isserving right now, so that deploy publishes this file and nothing else — no
release timing is involved.
The rest of what the search turned up (no
sitemap.xml, nocanonical, andthe Japanese half of the page hidden from a JavaScript-rendering crawler
because the language is negotiated from
navigator.languagesand there is nocrawlable
?lang=jaURL) is a separate change. A sitemap cannot be submitteduntil the property is verified anyway, so it follows this rather than riding
with it.