Hub site not indexed by Google (it is by Bing though...)

TylerCowdreyWADNR · ‎03-29-2022

I am experiencing issues trying to get a Hub site to show up in a Google search (url: https://kelp-canopy-vital-sign-for-puget-sound-wadnr.hub.arcgis.com/). When the issue was first identified a few weeks ago I added many tags thinking that might be the problem, but it does not appear to have changed anything. Further digging shows that the site is not even indexed by Google, despite being live for over two months now (see attached).

Using the Google Search Console, there are a number of options to add the site to Google's index but I have not been able to implement any of them. It appears that the level of "ownership" of the site required to implement these solutions is not something I have access to (e.g. edit DNS configuration, upload HTML file to site home page, embed HTML tag in the <head> section of the site, etc.).

I am not a web developer, so perhaps I'm missing some other way I should be going about this, but I'm at wits end currently. I've avoided creating a Google Analytics account so far because it's something we're not really interested in, but maybe that's a potential solution.

Hoping someone here knows more about this than me and can point me to a solution. Thanks!

TylerCowdreyWADNR · ‎04-21-2022

Thanks AJ for the info. These seem like good tips to get the site moved up in priority within the search list, but I don't believe they address the root issue we are having. Our site is not indexed by Google at all... You can literally search for our specific URL in Google and it simply does not show up.

Per my post above the methods Google provides for adding a site to its index all require a level of HTML "ownership" access that do not appear accessible in Hub. Did they provide you a way to get the site indexed other than what you included here? Thanks!

AJ_devaccount · ‎04-21-2022

No unfortunately they didn't provide any other ways. I guess using Google Analytics is the only way to verify and index it?

MariekedeGeest · ‎01-02-2023

@TylerCowdreyWADNR I can see that your hub is now indexed by Google. Would you mind posting what the eventual solution was to the ArcGIS Hub site not appearing in Google Search? This would be of tremendous help to our community members that face the same issue.

TylerCowdreyWADNR · ‎01-03-2023

I wish I could tell you that something we did fixed the problem, but the site just showed up on its own a couple of months ago. Clearly something in the Google indexing protocol was not identifying Hub sites in a timely manner but finally got around to it. I hope for this community's sake that this was finally resolved due to a change in their protocol rather than a persistent feature that delays indexing going forward. Not having our site live for over 6 months was not ideal.

Sveouu · ‎08-28-2023

@TylerCowdreyWADNR Glad your issue has eventually been resolved.

Unfortunately, we are also having the same issues still for our hub site: https://maps-bgs.opendata.arcgis.com/ The Hub site has been shared publicly for a couple of months, but has not been indexed by google to appear in searches. It has google analytics enabled and is producing stats, so I am surprised it has still not been indexed by google.

TylerCowdreyWADNR · ‎09-05-2023

Incredible... talk about left hand not talking to the right 😞