Get your website into Google — Search Console and your sitemap
Publishing your website makes it reachable. It does not make it findable. Google has to discover your pages, decide to fetch them, and then decide to keep them — and for a new site it will happily skip all three steps for weeks unless you introduce yourself. Google Search Console is where that introduction happens. It's free, it takes an afternoon, and most community sites never do it.
Before you start: use your own domain
Search Console only lets you manage a domain you can prove you own. Your site's platform address (`yourcommunity-site.` on our domain) works perfectly for visitors, but you can't verify it — the domain is ours. So the first step is the one that unlocks the rest: connect a custom domain. Once your site answers at your own domain, that address becomes the canonical one automatically — every page, every share card and the sitemap all point at it.
1. Add your domain to Search Console
- Go to Search Console and click Add property.
- Choose Domain (not URL prefix) and enter your domain without `https://` — for example `yourcommunity.com`. A Domain property covers every address under it at once.
- Google shows you a TXT record. Add it at the place where you manage the domain's DNS — the same panel where you created the record that connected the domain to your site.
- Back in Search Console, click Verify. DNS changes can take a few minutes to be visible; if it fails, wait and try again.
Google's own walkthrough: Verify your site ownership.
2. Submit your sitemap
Your site already publishes a sitemap — a list of every public page, post, listing, agent profile and agent site on it — at `/sitemap.xml`. You don't build or maintain it; it updates itself as you publish.
- In Search Console, open Sitemaps in the left menu.
- Enter `sitemap.xml` and click Submit.
- The status should read Success within a day, with the number of pages it discovered.
One sitemap per address: if you connected a custom domain, submit it there. The old platform address's sitemap simply redirects to it, so there is nothing to submit twice. Background reading: Build and submit a sitemap.
3. Ask for your most important pages
A submitted sitemap tells Google what exists. It does not oblige Google to fetch any of it. For a new site, ask directly:
- Paste your homepage address into the search bar at the top of Search Console (URL inspection).
- Click Test live URL. The result should say the page is available to Google, crawl allowed, indexing allowed. If it says anything else, stop and check the page is published and public.
- Click Request indexing.
- Repeat for two or three pages that matter most — your agent directory, your listings page, your best post.
Don't request every page; the quota is small and it's meant for what matters. Details: The URL inspection tool.
4. Read the Page indexing report
After a few days, open Pages (the Page indexing report). It sorts every address Google knows about into a handful of states. These are the ones you'll see:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Indexed | Google keeps the page and can show it. This is the number that matters. |
| Discovered – currently not indexed | Google knows the address exists but hasn't fetched it yet. Normal for a new site with few links pointing at it. Patience and links, not fixes. |
| Crawled – currently not indexed | Google fetched the page and chose not to keep it — usually thin or near-duplicate content. Make the page worth keeping. |
| Duplicate without user-selected canonical | Google found the same page at two addresses. Your site redirects old addresses to the canonical one, so this clears on its own after the next crawl. |
| Excluded by "noindex" tag | The page asked to be left out — for example a post you hid from search on purpose. |
Google's reference for every status: Page indexing report.
What to expect
- Verification and the sitemap: same day.
- A requested homepage: usually days.
- The rest of the sitemap: weeks, and it depends far more on who links to you than on anything technical. See Why your site isn't in Google yet.
- Once pages are indexed, the Performance report shows the searches that led people to you. That report, checked monthly, is the whole feedback loop.
Bing, while you're at it
Bing Webmaster Tools can import your verified Search Console property in one click — and Bing's index also feeds several AI assistants. Ten minutes, once.