Thimble published projects aren't being indexed by Google

[humphd]

If you try a Google search for site:https://d157rqmxrxj6ey.cloudfront.net it only returns a very small number of things that look like projects made in the early weeks of turning the site on. Is there something we need to do in order to get Google to do the right thing here? Have we been blacklisted?

I ask because there is a desire from the learning team to be able to see what people are making, and being able to do this via a standard Google query would be ideal.

cc @hannahkane

[hannahkane]

cc @ldecoursy @chadsansing

[jbuck]

I bet those projects exist in the Google search index because they were linked from somewhere that Google already indexes.

I suspect the solution would be to add a sitemap so that Google knows what URLs to index. @adamlofting confirm/deny?

[adamlofting]

Confirmed. Google will need something to point at the sites so it knows they exist.

This could be an autogenerated XML sitemap, and/or some navigatable directory with links that get to the end content.

[jbuck]

@adamlofting Great, thanks!

@humphd I filed mozilla/publish.webmaker.org#168 to implement this feature