UCSF Website Updates

News and announcements regarding UCSF websites, as well as best practices and tips for getting the most out of your web presence.

How to Improve Your Google Search Results

Often people build a website and it doesn't show up in a Google search. 

The bad news: Several things could be preventing you from showing up in Google.

The good news: Many of them are easy to fix.

For a site to show up in Google two things need to happen.

  1. Google needs to know about your site!
  2. You have content that's relevant to the search term (usually not a problem at UCSF!)
  3. You should have links from other sites to your site (see this blog post)

For #1 I recommend using google webmaster tools, the site verification, XLM Sitemap, and XML sitempate node modules. Some help on that below.

To prove ownership of the site you will need to enable the Site Verification module

To improve search engines ablity to search your site turn on XML sitemap engines and XML sitemap node on the modules page (found in the admin menu at the top of the page when you are logged in <https://yoursite.ucsf.edu/admin/modules>).

Here comes the annoying part. You need to change each content type you want google to find from For example https://yoursite.ucsf.edu/admin/structure/types/manage/page find the XML sitemap field and changed to included.

Then run chron. <https://yoursite.ucsf.edu/admin/reports/status/run-cron>

This will give you a sitemap to enter into the webmaster tools. That will help google to index all the content on your site.

The sitemap should be at https://yoursite.ucsf.edu/sitemap.xml

It should look something like this sitemap https://websites.ucsf.edu/sitemap.xml

Good Luck. Google SEO is a bit of a mystery, but the above tips should help.