Access to Search Console would require an NDA and SRE-Access-Requests

I’ll try and get someone from Operations on IRC to give their thoughts.

See https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Console_access. In short, you need a really good reason, a valid NDA and a sponsor from WMF staff.

And could someone at WMF work with me to add Wikinews in Italian to Google News without giving me access?

In T253988#6176514, @Ferdi2005 wrote:

And could someone at WMF work with me to add Wikinews in Italian to Google News without giving me access?

Quite probably, someone with SRE might be able to advise on that so leaving on their radar.

Hi @Ferdi2005 the entire wikinews.org already has a google-site-verification TXT record in DNS. So that part is not needed. Once i logged in with the special account for this it.wikinews.org was shown as auto-verified.

Then i saw "URL is not on Google. This page is not in the index, but not because of an error."

I clicked "request indexing" next and now it says "indexing requested". That seems to be about all that can be done here. I am not aware of submitting specifically to be added to Google News.

Do you have any more details what you would expect to happen in the Google UI?

Hi @Dzahn. I'd like to thank you really much for the help that you're providing us! So, as I can see we don't have to submit a publication for Google News anymore, but if I understood well, we woud need to add Italian Wikinews to the Google Publication Center so that they can gather our countent from Italian Wikinews feed, you can find it at: https://itwikinews-rss.toolforge.org/
This is the Google support page that talks about publication center: https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607025?hl=en&ref_topic=9603441
Could you do this for us? Thank you very much in advance! If you don't have time for this or it isn't in your work, I can understand, but I'll need to get access to Search Console to add it somehow 😄.
Could you also look if there is anything else to do in Search Console to be well-indexed on Google and if Google is indexing us well and people arrive from Google, maybe giving us some statistics?

I'm also going to check if there is anything alse to do on Italian Wikinews to make Google happy 😸.

Thanks again!

Hi @Ferdi2005,

I logged into the "Publisher Center". There were no existing domains or projects in it. This would be the first site ever to be added.

I clicked around a bit to get an idea what is needed there.

It turns out it is far more than just a few mouse clicks to add the site and an RSS feed.

It includes having to create "sections", logos in different sizes, setting a legal country of the publisher, categories and many more things. Most notably it also includes settings about Google placing ads into content published in Google News.

This is something that would need legal review, some type of automation , discussion whether we can delegate it, who does SEO at WMF and more.

I can't just do that by myself and it doesn't seem to scale to do that for all languages anyways.

I created T254437 for the bigger picture now.

@Dzahn it.Wikinews is really poorly indicizated, an article "Apple passa ad ARM e annuncia altre novità" is at the sixth page of Google.
Is there anything we can do about it? Any suggestions from the console?

@Ferdi2005 This is blocked by T254437. That is outside of my control now. I would ask you to please ping (the assignee) there.

Removing the SRE-Access-Requests tag for now, please re-add when ready to proceed with this. Thanks!