#1

Hello, i am using obsidian publish for a couple months now - and overall i love the experience. I am using it partly to easy share resources with people i work with, but i would also love to reach out to wider audience.
I was under the impression that search engines would recognize the content and i would be able to find it via google-search.
But so far i have no luck at all. Even after months online, nothing turns up when i search for relevant and easy recognizable search terms that fit the content of my notes.

I made sure that in the publish settings, the point that is labeled “disallow search engines to travel the site” is grayed out - aka turned off. My understanding is that this should allow search engines to recognize my content.

The site itself is around 500 notes, with lots of content, mostly german but around 10% in english also.

Its published here: Obsidian Publish

Any idea why i cant seem to find any trace of it in search results at all?
Anything i can change (like including a robot.txt) to make really sure search engines travel it. Is it possible for me to check if its traveled at all?

Thanks in advance for any help!

EDIT:
I tried site:htt ps://publish.obsidian.md/marcbielert to check if the site is indexed at all, and nothing shows up - so i guess for some reason its not getting searched.

#2

Have you linked to your site from anywhere at all? Google follow links, but they don’t have knowledge of sites that no site points to.

Although I suspect your site will show up on Google in a few days. Google crawls our forum pretty well (try searching for site:forum.obsidian.md).

1 Like
#3

Its linked from a couple forums - (posted it here like 3-4 months ago also), so yes - its linked. For me it seems like for some reason its disallowing the search engine to index, cause i am doing web dev for 20 years now, and never had a site not listed after 4-5 months - only if i somehow restricted acess to it.

#4

Thanks for the update!

To be sure, could you just show me a screenshot of this part of the settings? That sounds like the most likely explanation for what’s happening.

#5

Screenshot 2021-07-05 235606
Screenshot 2021-07-05 2356062157×1647 205 KB

Maybe its also worth to note that i only publish content from a subfolder, so there never is content in the root-folder. Means, in my vault is a subfolder called “Publish” - where every content lives that is ok to be published, but i always publish from within my main-vault, so this is a subfolder. Hope this makes sense =)

#6

not sure if you read my reply, maybe i replied wrongly and you didnt get noticed - the issue is still present and i am still wondering what i am doing wrong.

#7

I just checked your site and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be crawled. That said, there are two suspicions I have:

  1. We don’t have a sitemap (on a per site basis) so engines don’t have a great time walking through the site. Links should still work though, so this isn’t really the problem we’re seeing with your site

  2. Google only re-crawls site once in a while, and your site is under Obsidian’s domain publish.obsidian.md instead of a custom domain, so it’s only crawled when Google decides to go through our entire publish domain.

I’ll likely address 1) sometime in the future, but I’m not sure there’s much we can do for 2).

Writing a digital book in Obsidian Publish. Some questions I have
#8

Thanks for the answer, this makes sense.
Guess i will test out the custom-domain with Cloudflare and see how it works.

#9

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