Make your Hexo blog appear on Google Search

This is an article helping you to set up a Hexo plugin that helps your blogs appear on Google, Bing, and Baidu search engine

I will only mention the way to set up the configuration for Google Search Engine since it’s more complicated then Bing, and I don’t use Baidu

Basically, you should only read this post after reading this Official Document (en.cjh0613.com)

Let’s go

There are steps:

  1. Create a google search console account
  2. Create a project and a service account to use Google Indexing API
  3. Add the service account mail to the Ownership

Create a google search console account

Create it then add a property to the account which is your website, there are several way to verify the ownership, there’s no complexity here so you should figure it out yourself

Create a project and a service account

You can follow this guides to accomplish this

Add the service account mail to the Ownership

This is where the problem happens. I didn’t read the guides fully, because they already mentioned it here, a below section on the article

If you don’t add the service account’s email to the ownership list, you will get this response when you try to do submit the url

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Google response:  {
  error: {
    code: 403,
    message: 'Permission denied. Failed to verify the URL ownership.',
    status: 'PERMISSION_DENIED'
  }
}

Here’s the solution:

You go to Google Search Console (also there’s this old webpage here mentioned in several places when it comes to this verification failure, since there was a bug in the Google Search Console, but it’s fixed so you don’t need to care anymore )
on the right side, scroll down and click on Settings, then Users and permissions
here, you click Add user and paste your service account email which should look like abc@xyz.iam.gserviceaccount.com, then set the permission to Owner

And you’re done. If it helps please comment down below to let me know