May 24 2019

Submit WordPress.org Site to Google Indexer Without Business Plan

As we know, Google removes Public URL Submission Tool last year. For change, they ask (force) website owner to use Google Search Console tool, which basically works the same, with some key differences:

  • You have to own the website. You cannot submit wild URL to Google anymore.
  • You actually have to submit XML sitemap to Google Index. You can’t just submit the root URL of your website anymore.

Now this complicates things for free WordPress.org users, because WordPress indeed give the way for you to build a XML sitemap, but only using plugins. And you can only use *any* plugins if you have a business plan of WordPress.

So how we can solve this for us fellow free WordPress.org users? Luckily, WordPress.org still generate RSS feed which contains links to your posts. But this RSS feed doesn’t contains links to any menus and pages. So that’s out of the question. This solution will only help you to make Google index your posts.

So how to do it?

1. Login to Google Search Console

You can do so by clicking here: https://search.google.com/search-console

2. Claim the ownership of your website

If you haven’t, you need to claim the ownership of your website by doing some verification steps. I will not delve into details for this matter in this post. You can read the steps here.

  1. Add Property
  2. Verify Property

3. Get the RSS feed of your blog

From this explanation from WordPress, your RSS feed for your blog should be your base blog URL + “/feed”. For example, my blog feed would be:

https://martintjandra.wordpress.com/feed

This is already in XML format. Meaning this is the acceptable format for Google Search Console. You can click on the link above to see what’s actually contained within an XML RSS feed.

4. Submit the RSS feed to Google Search Console

Open your Google Search Console, on the left menu, within the Index category, click on Sitemap menu.

Put the “feed” in the Add New Sitemap.

And click SUBMIT.

5. Adjust the number of posts of the RSS feed

Last but not least, WordPress limited the number of posts sent through RSS feed to just 10 latest posts. But you want all of your posts to be indexed, right? So you need to make some adjustment to that number.

  1. Open your WordPress menu on top left, called “My Sites”
  2. Tap on your blog if it hasn’t already been selected by default.
  3. Find your blog Settings menu on the left bottom part of the menu.
  4. If you see four tabs called “General”, “Performance”, “Writing”, “Discussion”, you’re already on the right place.
  5. Tap on the “Writing” tab.
  6. Scroll down, and find the Feed Settings.
  7. Set the Display X most recent blog posts to your heart content.
  8. Save Settings.
  9. Now you wait for Google to actually fetch the sitemap and read all the links in it. You can’t speed up this process. It’s up to the Google’s bot, when it wants to do it.

You can check whether Google has crawled any link in your website by going to Google Search Console, and put the URL on top center of the Google Search Console.

Things to note

I know, I know that this might be not without downsides, as this may bombard people that actually subscribe to your RSS feed in their device. The data is not big, but it might be actually annoying to overwhelm users when browse through your RSS feed entries in their device. But then again, this is just a slight discomfort in my opinion, and I rarely find people who actually uses RSS feeds, and finally, this also the only way for you to circumvent this Google Search Console issue. So use it at your own discretion.

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