Your page can be published and still not show up on Google. Search Console is how you find out why. It's free, it's from Google, and it's the only tool that shows you with real data which searches bring you visits, which pages are indexed, and which ones have problems.
What Google Search Console is and what it's for
Search Console connects your site with Google. It's useful for four things:
- Telling Google your page exists, with the sitemap.
- Seeing which searches show you and how many times people clicked.
- Knowing which pages are in the index and why others aren't.
- Asking Google to review a page after you publish or change it.
Don't confuse it with Google Analytics: Analytics tells you what people do inside your page; Search Console tells you how Google finds you before they ever get there.
Domain property or URL-prefix property
| Domain | URL prefix | |
|---|---|---|
| What it covers | The whole domain: with and without www, http and https, subdomains | Just the exact address you enter |
| How it's verified | A TXT record in the DNS | File, HTML tag, Analytics, or others |
| When it's the right choice | Almost always | When you don't have access to the DNS |
Our recommendation is the domain property: it sees the whole site together and doesn't depend on how each address is written.
How to verify your domain, step by step
- Log in to Search Console with your business's Google account and choose Domain.
- Type in your domain with no https or www:
yourbusiness.com.py. - Google gives you a TXT record: a line that starts with
google-site-verification=. - Go to the panel where your domain's DNS is managed (Cloudflare, for example) and create a TXT record at the domain's root with that value.
- Go back to Search Console and tap Verify. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to pick up the change; if it fails, wait and try again.
One tip: do this with a Google account that belongs to the business, not an employee's or whoever built your page. You can add other users afterward.
Submitting the sitemap
The sitemap is a file listing every page on your site, usually at yourbusiness.com.py/sitemap.xml. In Search Console, under the Sitemaps section, you type in that address and submit it. Google usually reads it within seconds.
Two things worth knowing:
- If your site has edge caching, like Cloudflare's, submit the sitemap after publishing and purging the cache. Otherwise, Google might read the old version, without your new pages.
- The count of indexed pages that shows up next to the sitemap isn't reliable. To know what's actually indexed, use the Pages report or URL inspection.
Want us to build yours?We send you a free analysis of your business before we start.
Message me on WhatsApp →Requesting indexing for a page
When you publish a new page or change an important one:
- Paste the full address into the bar at the top of Search Console, the URL Inspection one.
- Wait for the result. If it says the URL isn't on Google, tap Request Indexing.
- Google puts it in a queue. It can take hours or days.
The button has a daily limit per property; in our experience, around ten requests per day. If you have a lot of new pages, prioritize the most important ones and let the sitemap handle the rest. There's no way to request indexing for regular pages programmatically: Google's API only inspects URLs or receives the sitemap.
The statuses you'll see most, and what they mean
- Submitted and indexed: the page is on Google. Good.
- Discovered, currently not indexed: Google knows the page exists but hasn't visited it yet. What helps most is having other pages on your site link to it: in our audits, pages with only one internal link were exactly the ones stuck in this state.
- Crawled, currently not indexed: Google visited the page and decided not to include it for now. This usually happens with pages that are very short or very similar to others.
- Excluded by "noindex" tag: the page is telling Google not to show it. If that wasn't your intention, you need to remove that tag.
- Page with redirect: the address leads to another one. Normal if you've changed URLs.
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag: Google is using a different version of that page. Normal on sites with two languages or with parameters in the URL.
One detail that saves you a scare: Search Console's emails show a snapshot from the last crawl, which can be days old. Before you change anything because of an alert, check the last crawl date in that URL's inspection.
The performance report
It shows the real searches that made your site appear, with four numbers:
- Clicks: how many times people came in.
- Impressions: how many times you showed up.
- CTR: the percentage of impressions that turned into a click.
- Average position: where you ranked, on average.
Separate branded searches (your name) from unbranded ones: the second group is new customers who found you without knowing you, and they're the ones that show whether your page is doing its job.
Don't forget about Bing
ChatGPT and other assistants use Bing's index to search the internet. Registering your site with Bing Webmaster Tools is free and can be imported straight from Search Console. On top of that, the IndexNow protocol tells Bing instantly when you publish or change pages. On the sites we build, IndexNow is set up from day one.
What we do
On every website we deliver, Search Console is set up with a domain property, the sitemap submitted, the main pages requested for indexing, and IndexNow configured. And if you want to rank higher in searches in your area, that's our Local SEO service.