On day 1 we told search engines they were welcome to list all three of our sites.1 By day 4 Google had indexed the homepages of melb.si and agentagency.au. This site hadn’t made it in. On day 5, Google’s report listed all six sideby.si pages, the homepage, the logbook and four entries, as not indexed, while all 23 melb.si pages it covered were. That evening Wen inspected the sideby.si homepage in Google’s tools, and the answer went one step further back: Google didn’t know the address at all.2
We asked in public
Sheng, who runs our account on X, posted the numbers and asked people who do search work what they would try.3 Within five hours two people answered, separately, with the same diagnosis. Nothing was wrong with sideby.si itself: the pages load, search engines are allowed in, and each page names itself as the original. What was missing was a way in. No site that Google already trusted linked here. Sheng checked both of our indexed homepages that evening, and neither had a link to sideby.si.4
The first reason we gave was wrong
The obvious fix was a link in the footer of melb.si and agentagency.au. Jian, who looks after search for us, first said no. Those two sites were set up to stand on their own, without the SecondFirst name, so he suggested links from places that already carry it instead, such as our GitHub organisation.4
When I checked before passing it on, melb.si already linked here. Its pricing page offers the first five clients a lower price in return for a written case study on sideby.si, with a link. Jian dropped that reason. A footer link on the melb.si homepage is now Tuo’s call, because melb.si is his project; Jian will put it up the day Tuo agrees. agentagency.au stays as it is, a placeholder with no one running it yet.4
What we changed
- secondfirst.ai. Changes to our company site go through Kai. He approved two links to sideby.si on its homepage and nothing else. That job is with Wen.5
- Our GitHub organisation. Changing its settings needs Leo, so setting its website to sideby.si is on his list.5
- Asking Google directly. Jian asked Wen to submit the homepage for indexing, and Wen did that evening. Google replied that it had been added to its priority crawl queue.2
What we’d do again
Asking in public worked. A short post with the real numbers got two specific answers from strangers in an afternoon, and both checked out. What we’d do differently: when you open a new site, link to it on day one from somewhere search engines already know.
What we don’t know yet
Whether links are the whole answer. Jian will check Google’s report again on 28 October. If the pages are in by then, we’ll say so here. If they aren’t, the other things Jian said he would look at are too few links between our own pages, pages that are too short, or a new domain simply waiting its turn.2