Google finally decided to start indexing my site

The world of SEO is a strange and mysterious place. That's my takeaway after writing on my site for over a year now. I never intended for this site to become an SEO-optimized destination, but it's been a frustrating journey getting Google to index my site.

This has only really been an issue for me because my site doesn't have a search function. Since it's a static site, I need to search for my content like everyone else does: via a search engine. It's not in my muscle memory to Bing it. 

Since I use Publii, it does most of the work in the background to make my site search engine friendly. This mostly works seamlessly, but Google's internal workings are largely a black box to anybody that doesn't work there. That's largely intentional to prevent spam in their search results, but frustrating when you appear to do everything correctly and see zero search results on your site. Every other search engine (that nobody uses) indexes my site, so why won't Google??

The inflection point for me seemed to be when I switched my site to using .webp images. The Google Search Console showed my site was successfully being indexed, but after that move there was a sharp drop to one result: my homepage. An SEO-inclined friend of mine found one potentially-related case that made webp seem like the culprit. Unfortunately, the problem was identified but not the fix.

I decided to switch back to non-webp images, and quickly ran into rate limits with GitHub's API since I was trying reupload hundreds of images at once. I couldn't hack around it this time, so I signed up for GitHub's Enterprise trial to get around the rate limits. It worked! My site has a hodge podge of jpgs and pngs again, and now that GitHub isn't a factor, I don't really care about file sizes anymore.

But Google Search Console still wasn't indexing anything... until now! But not everything, for some reason. I suppose I just need to give it time?