If you’re unfamiliar with this game, ‘Ghost’ is the codename for a prominent recurring character in the Call of Duty campaigns.
Frustrated by the toxicity in various discussion groups, I decided to create a welcoming, toxic-free community for players who genuinely enjoy the game, ideally located on the same timezone (in EU).
I’ve previously built websites using static site generators like Gatsby, combined with GitHub, Netlify, and Contentful, but I’ve always been curious about trying this CMS. So far, I’m really impressed with the experience—it’s saved me a ton of time, and Stefan did an amazing job with the NIO theme.
Yesterday, I launched a Discourse forum with a customized theme. I’ve noticed that some people have already put effort into integrating Ghost with Discourse, so I’m eager to dive into this valuable information and explore how I could align the two platforms.
It seems that the sitemap is not fetched correctly yet by Google, but I’m guessing this could be linked with the indexing that is still going on for the site. If not, I was wondering if it could come from an issue w/ Fastly (but probably too soon to tell I think).
Even though the url is valid. But it is still saying “Processing data, please check again in a day or so” regarding the indexing so I’ll just patiently wait for this before digging more into it , for me it’s either because the site is too fresh and not correctly indexed yet, “or” a conf issue w/ Fastly.
… so that rules out that you accidentally set your site to private or something and forgot (I’ve seen that!)
You don’t have an additional proxy (thinking of Cloudflare) out in front of your site, do you? Just Ghost Pro’s Fastly? (Cloudflare in anti-bot modes can block crawlers, too.)
No I did not add any extra layer on top of what Ghost(pro) is offering, no need to add any extra CDN or WAF or whatever since - from what I understand - Ghost SaaS hosting is already taking care of all that .
I’m managing my dns zone & records with dnsmadeeasy, and all the rest (except for the forums part) is taken care of by Ghost hosting.
This morning at least I was able to crawl the site via the “site:” operator on google.com (wasn’t working yesterday), so there’s some progress on the indexing even if the console still mentions to wait for a day or so.
One thing though, in the “meta data” section, in the metadata description field, my text started w/ the following emoji : (european flag).
I just deleted a few mins ago to stick w/ pure text only, see if it could affect somehow the SEO.
Same issue from my side also. Search Console showed “couldn’t fetch” for the sitemap even though it was working fine. After some time it fixed itself, but I still wonder could things like emojis in metadata or DNS/CDN setups slow down Google from indexing?
No in the end i think there is no influence. To this day my sitemap is still stuck in a “couldn’t fetch” status, but it turns out Google has no issue to actually “fetch” it (tried it with the rich result tester or the url inspection in the search console, and it is correctly retrieving it).
It’s explained in google communities, it’s more like a misleading message. Here for example.
I discovered that there are lots of people complaining about this “couldn’t fetch” message about the sitemap, this is surprising that Google didn’t fix it (or at least changed the wording).
But in the end now I don’t really care about this msg as it appears that my website is now correctly indexed/referenced (which is all that mattered really). I’ll re-submit my URL though, see if one day I can get the correct status.
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, for me it’s either because the site is too fresh and not correctly indexed yet, “or” a conf issue w/ Fastly.
(european flag).