In Which Google Discovers Crowdecks and Immediately Finds Fault

Crowdecks has a website.

This is not news.

It has pages. It has pictures. It has writing. It has an increasingly suspicious number of projects involving animals.

You can type the address into a browser and there it is.

A functioning website.

Excellent.

Unfortunately, Google was unconvinced.

I don’t understand Google Search Console, so I signed up to an app called GSCWizard, which had mysteriously appeared offering to help with the business of getting Crowdecks noticed by search engines. The algorithm was doing its thing!

Free services, apparently.

How lovely.

Except that the free services turned out to be free only until you actually needed to use them.

‘We’ve scanned GSC and are ready to report. Just cross our palms with silver first…’

I declined.

I have already spent quite enough money creating things nobody asked me to create. I do not need to pay someone else to tell Google they exist.

So I decided to investigate Google Search Console myself.

This was my first mistake.

Apparently, simply having a functioning website is insufficient.

Google wanted a sitemap.

A sitemap, for anyone unfamiliar with the concept, is a little file that tells Google where all the pages are.

I had assumed Google, being Google, might be able to find them.

After all, finding things is rather its speciality.

But no.

Google wanted a list.

Fine.

Astra and I produced a sitemap.

We submitted it.

Google acknowledged receipt and announced that it was gathering data.

Wonderful.

We waited.

Eventually, Crowdecks began registering impressions in Google Search Console.

Four of them.

Four!

Somewhere out there, Google had apparently acknowledged that Crowdecks existed.

I was practically famous.

Unfortunately, this brief period of triumph was interrupted by an email.

Google had discovered a problem.

A page couldn’t be indexed because of a redirect.

Which page?

Google wasn’t particularly forthcoming about that.

After a certain amount of investigation, we discovered that the offending redirects were perfectly ordinary bits of website housekeeping. Different versions of addresses were being directed towards the preferred versions.

Which is exactly what they’re supposed to do.

The website wasn’t broken.

Google was simply reporting that it hadn’t indexed an address that wasn’t supposed to be indexed.

Thank you, Google.

Then there was the equally ominous announcement that some pages had been crawled but not indexed.

This sounds rather like something dreadful has happened to them.

In reality, it means Google has visited the pages, looked around, and decided not to put them in its search results. At least not yet.

No explanation required.

No appeal necessary.

Just a digital shrug.

Meanwhile, I could still open Crowdecks.

The pages loaded.

The pictures appeared.

The links worked.

Readers could read things.

The crows remained crows.

Everything was behaving exactly as intended.

Except, apparently, according to Google.

And this is where I began to recognise a familiar pattern.

The internet has developed an extraordinary talent for turning straightforward activities into elaborate administrative processes.

First, you create something.

Then you must prove that it exists.

Then you must submit documentation explaining how it exists.

Then a system informs you that it has found a problem with its existence.

You investigate.

There is no problem.

The system sends another email.

At some point, presumably, you are expected to purchase a dashboard that will explain the emails generated by the previous dashboard.

I am beginning to understand why people take up knitting.

Although, having previously attempted knitting, I can confirm that this too has its complications.

For now, Crowdecks continues to exist.

Google may index it.

Google may not.

Google may send me another email suggesting that a perfectly functioning page is somehow defective.

I shall investigate, swear a little, and probably discover that everything is fine.

In the meantime, the website remains open for business.

Not that it’s actually a business.

And if Google would like to visit, it’s very welcome.

The sitemap is by the door.