I can’t get my documentation pages at Testo documentation indexed by Google. It crawls them but doesn’t index them with no reason given by Google Search Console. DuckDuckGo indexed these pages just fine.
I’m hoping that maximizing Web-friendly links without the rel=nofollow attribute would help every honest community member get their links boosted in Web search results. I’m not sure what Discourse allows exactly. Maybe removing rel=nofollow from posts older than 10 days could work well without attracting spammers? Or something similar for trusted users based on their activity on the site.
Edit: just to see if the nofollow is removed after editing the post
For what it’s worth, here’s what Google Cloud Console shows us in such a situation: “Crawled - currently not indexed”. This particular URL is https://semgrep.github.io/testo/howtos/.
For the “root” page https://semgrep.github.io/testo/ which serves the pages at testo/docs at main · semgrep/testo · GitHub, we get another message about sitemaps. To my knowledge, this site has no sitemap (no /sitemap.xml, /sitemap.txt, or /sitemap) and I have no evidence that it would be useful here.
I suspect that getting a dedicated domain name might solve the problem and would be easiest but I’m not sure of this and I don’t like the idea of paying to promote ordinary non-commercial webpages.
The spam detection and user community flagging is pretty good these days, so I’ve experimentally turned off the nofollow attribute for new posts (not rebuilt all old ones). If you edit your post or do a new one, it should be nofollow
Update: We finally got a dedicated domain instead of ORGANIZATION.github.io/PROJECT and 4 days later, the pages showed up in Google Search results. It could be luck but it looks more likely that the domain change was key to getting the pages indexed.
