Search engines

Help search engines find your site, prove it's yours in their webmaster tools, and tell them the moment a page changes.

What HotDog does for you

Every build writes:

sitemap.xml: every page search engines should know about;
robots.txt, pointing to the sitemap;
a title, a summary and a canonical address on every page, which the checks keep honest.

Prove the site is yours

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools ask you to prove you own a site, often with a code to put on your home page. Put the codes in site.yaml:

verify:
  google: the-code-google-gives-you
  bing: the-code-bing-gives-you
  yandex: the-code-yandex-gives-you

The template puts them on the home page as the tags each one looks for. In the editor, Search engines does the same, and shows the sitemap address to give each console.

Tell them what changed: IndexNow

IndexNow lets you tell Bing, Yandex and others which pages changed, so they look again straight away.

Make up a key: 8 to 128 letters, numbers and dashes (openssl rand -hex 16 makes a good one). Put it in site.yaml:
```
indexnow: { key: 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef }
```
The build publishes it at /<key>.txt, which is how search engines know the pings are really yours.

Turn it on for your live target in publish.yaml:

targets:
  live:
    type: rsync
    host: deploy@web.example.org
    path: /var/www/example.org
    indexnow: true

or give the pull agent -indexnow.

After each publish, HotDog sends only the pages that were added, changed or removed since the last time. If nothing changed, it sends nothing. A failed ping is reported, and the site is still published.