Apropos Google Search Console: 

This might also be an opportunity to make public at least some of the data that Search Console provides to site owners. That should enable community members (especially from smaller projects) to detect such issues earlier and in a more systematic fashion - compared to the kind of experimentation on individual URLs that gave rise to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T325607 in this case. And also, to take a broader view, to think more systematically about content aspects of SEO. (Some of the smaller projects have been quite interested in this, see e.g. https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Search_engine_optimization .) If you are an editor of a non-Wikimedia website, Search Console is a standard tool to help understand where your readers are coming from, how they may be accessing your work and where your site may have issues that prevent them from doing so. There is no reason to assume it couldn't be quite useful for editors on Wikimedia wikis too.
 
Publishing some of the Search Console data was already considered a couple of years ago as part of the conversations about https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T172581 . Back then, there was a sense that while there might be some privacy considerations regarding the more granular data, other parts could be made available with relatively little effort. 

Regards, Tilman

On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 9:41 PM Sohom Datta <dattasohom1@gmail.com> wrote:
Has anyone tried telling the Google Search Console to index all the
Wikisource language domains? Presumably a Foundation sysadmin would
need to add the ownership verification tokens to do so:
https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome

This has already been done for a while.
 
for what I've read, it suffices to generate a sitemap file with MediaWiki and how to submit it to Google. There is a script for that: generateSitemap.php.
Once done, the sitemap has to be updated regularly in order to include the new pages.

I did look into this, but it seems like we do not generate sitemaps for any sites right now ? The closest I got was https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T198965 which mentions that we did generate them around 2018 and hosted them on sitemaps.wikimedia.org, however they were recently (in Jun 2023) deleted due to the sitemaps being out of date and not helping our SEO rankings for Wikipedia.

Also while digging this up right now, I came across https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T332101#8898869 which assumes that Google uses a RCFeed/EventStreams API provided by the Wikimedia Foundation to index pages. Is this true in the case of Wikisource, could it be possible that they (Google) might not be using this for Wikisource and/or Wikisource pages are getting filtered out (on Wikimedia Foundation's end) due to some configuration error ?

Regards,
Sohom Datta
---
Open-source contributor @Wikimedia, @Chromium


On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 8:59 PM Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup@gmail.com> wrote:
See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T325607#8846296 and onwards

Am Di., 1. Aug. 2023 um 17:27 Uhr schrieb Lauren Worden <laurenworden89@gmail.com>:
Has anyone tried telling the Google Search Console to index all the
Wikisource language domains? Presumably a Foundation sysadmin would
need to add the ownership verification tokens to do so:
https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome

-LW

On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 7:53 AM Dušan Kreheľ <dusankrehel@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hm.
>
> Page: La akonca (1888) (be.wikisource.org)
> Created day with the last modification: 17:26, 7 July 2023‎ CEST
> Indexed by Google: 7. júl 2023 18:21:14 UTC
>
> Not indexed: https://be.wikisource.org/wiki/Alkahol_(1913)
>
>
> 2023-08-01 8:47 GMT+02:00, Bodhisattwa <bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com>:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > Apologies for cross-posting.
> >
> > For those who have not noticed till now, Google is not indexing any
> > Wikisource language editions for the last couple of years which practically
> > means that any Wikisource contents in any languages, which are being
> > created in these years, are not searchable on Google and hence largely
> > remain invisible on the web.
> >
> > This is an extremely demotivating and frustrating situation for the
> > existing Wikisource volunteers to witness, draining away all of our past
> > and current efforts to bring and retain viewers, readers, GLAM partners and
> > any potential new editors. We already have a very low awareness and
> > visibility about Wikisource among general internet users due to lack of
> > organized support in these years but the invisibility on Google search
> > engine could become the last nail in our coffin, unless it is fixed soon.
> >
> > There is a phabricator ticket raised by Darwinius back in December 2022 -
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T325607.
> >
> > Can't this issue be put into priority by sys admins and WMF to work upon?
> > Wikisource is still a sister project of Wikimedia and it needs some very
> > basic care, after all.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Bodhisattwa
> > (Bengali Wikisource volunteer)
> >
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--
Amir (he/him)

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