Write both the names and URLs of your blogs and websites, in posts on Medium or Substack, and anywhere else you find it works, in order to make them appear as search results in Google or Bing. Circulate the tip to do this. Do it because your sites themselves now may not appear in google search results, not even if their exact names or unique phrases in them are searched.
Suspiciously unaccountable quirks of “indexing” of sites, by their bots that constantly review the web for present or new sites, are happening. You can confirm so as simply, ironically, as by googling on the question of how to make it list your site. At present no search results call the problem politically motivated. Instead they explain it as that sites may have code settings that discourage searchability, yet you are not aware of this, for a long established site that always used to appear in searches, and you would need a mindnumbing education in site coding and jargon like “root directory” to find the problem, or that Google’s bots may decide a new or altered site page needs verifying of ownership. Pointless new problems that searching used to work better without, clearly.
If folks can’t find your site even by searching on key phrases or its name, that completely stops you telling the folks in Youtube comments that your site exists, or of any info your site makes public. This because, as is already well known, Youtube’s automated moderation blocks practically any post with a url in it, and even with a disguised url, it recognises “com” or “wordpress” within longer strings of characters. Quora will allow a url once but it too classes as spam and autoblocks several postings of the same url. So you need to make site names and key phrases findability by writing them in places like here.
All asking or searching tells you that Google or Bing will only receive any requests for site listing if in the process you verify your site ownership, yet why do you need to own a site to want to make it findable? and this is now by a complicated method called “DNS verification”. It involves adding a line of code they give you, to a particular place in your site’s settings. Even after you do this, they can still take undetermined months to catch up with the searchability ! You have only put your site into a queue for that ! Now, if the problem has happened to a Wordpress site, there is a money trap here. Wordpress only gives you access to the DNS settings as part of a paid subscription for your site. Though Wordpress sites are available free, if you choose a free site you can’t do this “DNS verification” thing on it, so can’t stop the big search engines ignoring the site for unaccountable reasons.
This trap is particularly striking when Wordpress has just, on Jul 14, announced to its users Bao Nguyen’s new campaigning short film Code For the People, https://codeforthepeople.com. It is a call to use “open source” public sharing of programs and code, for anyone’s use qnd ownership of their own work, to defend the open internet from growing more business controlled, and it is largely an advert for Wordpress as a leader of this cause. It gives the name “platform decay” to the notorious business phenomenon, where something on the web, a service or a writing place or a community, is initially provided free, but after it has picked up a lot of users and their online lives have grown dependent on it, it reduces or ends the free element and makes the thing paid for. It is a good point in the film, one of the ways that business breaks down the open internet. It adds up to a pull back to the old pressure on the public to trust and only believe the elite-led media-selected view of reality, shutting out everything outside the core consensuses in politics and science and religion, that used to be such an oppression of thought in the era before the web.
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