90 Degrees Is Apparently 99 Degrees

A broken press, a confused angle gauge, Google Search Console, and another thing I didn't know how to do yesterday.

Today did not begin with a plan to learn about Google.

It began with my press trying to kill its own tooling.

I work as a machine operator, and the press I was using has an automatic tool changer. In theory, this is very useful. It has two fingers that pick up the tooling and put it where it needs to go.

Today, those fingers kept knocking the tools over.

Not ideal.

Eventually an engineer came out and discovered the tool changer was about 1.6 mm out of alignment.

Excellent. We had found the problem.

He adjusted it.

The two fingers promptly started crashing into each other.

Apparently my machine doesn't particularly enjoy being correct.

So he put it back the way it was.

This somehow led to another problem. The machine would no longer travel upwards parallel.

The technical solution to this was one I'm pleased to report I'm already highly qualified in:

Turn it off and turn it back on again.

Six times.

Eventually it decided to cooperate.

Then my Digipro, the digital tool I use to measure bend angles, informed me that a 90-degree angle was actually 99 degrees.

It wasn't.

The Digipro will now be going away for several weeks to think about what it's done.

By the time I got home, my brain was pretty much done.

So naturally I decided this was the perfect time to learn Google Search Console.

Why was I doing this to myself?

The day before, I'd finally connected Woven Roots to its own domain.

TheWovenRoots.com was alive.

We've started putting more weight behind Woven Roots recently. The projects are becoming real things rather than just ideas, the first Hightrees and Yibnib book has been published, Ferret Mail exists, Heartbox is being rebuilt, and I've started documenting how all of this happened.

That raised another question.

How does Google know any of it exists?

I'd always assumed that if you made a website and put it on the internet, Google would eventually wander past and find it.

That's not entirely wrong.

But I learned there's a little more you can do to help.

Google has something called Search Console. It lets website owners verify that a website belongs to them, see information about how Google is finding their site, troubleshoot problems and provide Google with a sitemap. Google describes crawling as the process of discovering publicly available URLs, while indexing is when it analyses a page and stores information about its content so it can potentially appear in relevant searches.

A sitemap, as I now know, is essentially a list of URLs on your website that gives search engines useful starting points for finding its pages.

Yesterday I didn't know that.

Today apparently I was going to learn.

The first wall

Before Google would let me do much, I had to prove that I actually owned the website.

Fair enough.

Google presented me with a verification method involving downloading an HTML file and putting it on my website.

I should probably mention something important here.

I don't traditionally build websites.

The Woven Roots site is hosted through an AI website-building platform. I can tell the AI what I want changed, but that isn't the same experience as sitting there with a folder full of website files and casually dropping Google's verification file into the right place.

Not that I knew the HTML-file method was the traditional sort of approach.

It was simply the option Google kept putting in front of me.

So I kept trying to make it work.

It didn't.

There was quite a lot of staring at instructions.

There may have been some swearing.

Then I noticed something.

Google offered other verification methods.

One of them used an HTML tag.

A tag, apparently

Instead of uploading a whole verification file, Google can provide a little <meta> tag that gets added to the homepage.

Google then looks for that tag as proof that whoever is trying to claim the website has enough control over it to put the tag there. That's a legitimate Search Console verification method for the appropriate property type.

Now that was something I could work with.

I took the tag Google gave me and asked the AI builder to put it where Google required it.

Back to Search Console.

Verify.

Success.

I owned my own website.

Which was reassuring because I'd already paid for it.

Then came the sitemap

Once I was verified, the next job was submitting the sitemap.

This bit was considerably less dramatic.

I found the sitemap address generated for the site, went into the Sitemaps section of Search Console, entered it and submitted it.

Then Google gave me the message I'd spent the evening trying to reach:

Sitemap submitted successfully.

Google will now periodically process it and look for changes.

After spending the working day with a machine that couldn't move straight and an angle gauge that couldn't recognise a right angle, Google successfully reading my sitemap felt like a considerably greater achievement than it probably was.

If you've found this because you're stuck too

First, an important disclaimer:

I'm not an SEO expert.

I'm a machine operator who didn't know what a sitemap was until very recently.

This is simply what worked for me.

If you're building a website using an AI website builder or another hosted platform and you're struggling with Search Console verification, don't assume the first verification method you see is the only one available.

For a URL-prefix property, Google supports several verification methods. The HTML meta-tag method can be useful when you can't easily upload Google's verification file but can get your website platform to place Google's tag on your homepage. A full Domain property is different and uses DNS verification instead.

Once you've verified ownership, you can submit your sitemap through Search Console's Sitemaps report. Google says submitting a sitemap tells it where the sitemap lives. It isn't actually uploading the sitemap to Google.

And one other thing I learned:

Submitting a sitemap does not mean you'll suddenly appear at the top of Google tomorrow.

That's not what it does.

Google can discover pages by following links and reading sitemaps, and new sites can simply take time to be discovered and indexed. Search Console also has a URL Inspection tool if you later want to see what Google knows about a particular page or request indexing for an individual URL.

So if you're stuck where I was, the useful version is:

Verify the site. Find the verification method that actually works with the way your website is hosted. Submit the sitemap. Then give Google time to do its thing.

That's as technical as I'm pretending to be.

Another thing learned backwards

There seems to be a pattern developing here.

I wrote a novel before learning how to properly use Word.

I started building applications before I knew what syntax meant.

I bought a domain before I knew what Google Search Console did.

Now I've submitted a sitemap.

I seem to learn things in roughly the opposite order you're supposed to.

But that's okay.

I don't think you need to understand every step of a journey before you're allowed to take the first one.

Sometimes you start with:

I have an idea.

Then you hit something you don't understand.

So you learn that bit.

Then you hit the next thing.

You learn that too.

Eventually you look behind you and realise you know considerably more than you did when you started.

Yesterday, I didn't know what a sitemap was.

Today, Google has one.

I still don't know why my angle gauge thinks 90 degrees is 99.

One problem at a time.