How to submit an URL to Google in the new Google Search Console?

Thomas had a fantastic system for adding URL’s to Google and to make Google index them in the old Google Search Console. But, recently Google forced him to use the new Search Console, and he had to find a new way to submit his articles and posts to Google. How is it done?

Luckily, things are even easier in the new version of Google Search Console. Probably, you do not even need the help of Thomas to fix it, but in case you wonder how to make Google index your sites and articles quickly, this is what you need to do.

Submit an URL to Google in the new Search Console

First of all, you need to add your domain to your Google profile in Google Search Console. That is the first, and most important step. Once this is done, follow the instructions in the video beneath, or do as follows.

Press URL inspection in the menu on the left. You will then simply be taken to the “search bar” at the top of the page. Add your URL to this bar, and it will start asking Google what it knows about the URL. If it has been indexed already, you will get a message about that. If it hasn’t been indexed, you can ask Google to index it.

url inspection google search console

Once you have finished the index request, you will see a message looking something like this.

Your indexing request has been sent to Google
Your indexing request has been sent to Google

That was it, Thomas has fixed it, and you can submit your URL’s to Google in the new Search Console as well.

It is important to submit quality, and if you do, Google will normally index your article within a few minutes. If you submit spam, it probably won’t get indexed at all.

Have you enjoyed this little tutorial from The Thomas Stories? Give it a like, an upvote, and share it with people who might find it useful!

How to find out if Google has indexed your website?

Thomas has created an article and would like to know if Google has indexed it already, or if he needs to manually submit it for indexing. Is there an easy way to discover if Google has indexed your website or not?

One of the most annoying things on earth is to have a fantastic product, but nobody knows about it, and thus the success keeps its distance. And, Thomas is afraid that all his brilliant articles will fail to succeed, at least if people cannot find them in Google. But, how can Thomas find out if Google has actually indexed his articles or not? Is there an easy way to find out?

Has Google indexed my website?

It is very easy to find out if Google has indexed your website or your articles? Here are two methods you can use easily.

Ask Google

This is probably the easiest and quickest version. All you need to do is to visit www.google.com and to search for the address/article/website you are curious about.

search google
Enter the exact address in Google and press search.

If your site has been indexed, you will find it in the search results. If you cannot find any content, then it hasn’t been indexed yet.

Visit Google Search Console and do an URL inspection

Make sure to register your website in the Google Search Console. Once it is registered, use the URL inspection tool and search for the address you would like to know more about.

URL inspection
Type the exact address of the article you are interested in…

If the article has been indexed, you will see something like this.

The URL is on Google and has been indexed
The URL is on Google and has been indexed

If the article hasn’t been indexed, the Search Console will tell you so, and it will also offer to index it so that it can be found in the search results.

Thomas now knows that Google has indexed his article

Thomas has discovered that Google has in fact indexed all his articles, and he is happy to see that Google is quick to index his new content.

Has Google indexed your content as well? Did this article help you? Make sure to bookmark the site, and to follow The Thomas Stories on your favorite social media sites.

How to import a Drupal blog to WordPress?

Thomas is a gigantic WordPress fan. He would never use any other CMS-system, and he hasn’t even tried (and almost not even heard of) Drupal. But, one day he is offered a challenge. 

A friend of Thomas has been running a Drupal website for more than 10 years. The website consists of more than 1500 posts and articles, and now he wants to import all the content to his brand new WordPress site. Is that even possible? The thought of copying all those articles manually makes Thomas feel sick and depressed. There has got to be a way to do this job automatically, or maybe not?

Understanding Drupal is hard for Thomas

The first thing Thomas understands is that Drupal is quite different from WordPress when it comes to the structure of blog posts and content. He bumps into the word “nodes” lots of times, and he is quite confused. What can he do?

drupal to wordpress

Thomas finds a WordPress plugin

Thomas has been looking for a solution, and he has found a WordPress plugin named FG Drupal to WordPress. It looks very promising, and he quickly gives it a try. To make it word, he has to add the information about the SQL database of the Drupal website, and of course, the login credentials and name of the database. After that the job is easy, and the content is imported.

There are some options that needs to be set when it comes to importing media, featured images and so on, but Thomas tries a couple of times to make sure everything is imported the way he wants to.

Thomas isn’t completely satisfied

There is, however, a few problems. The free version of FG Drupal to WordPress doesn’t import categories, nor taxonomies (that is, tags). This is problematic, because those are a crucial part of the structure of the website. For that reason, Thomas decides to purchase the Premium version. He feels sorry about paying 50 Euro for a plugin that he will only use once, but it is worth it (after all, his friend is paying), and because it has to be there fore the website to work like it should.

After importing, Thomas has to install some extra plugins in order to see the imported Drupal content correctly. This is because of the strange structure of the Drupal databse and website, but after some hours, the job is done, and he is 99% satisfied with the job he has done.

Are you ready to import your Drupal website to WordPress?

Hopefully, the instructions and this tutorial from Thomas will help you migrate your Drupal website to WordPress. if you have any comments or maybe a question, use the comment field!

How to include a Medium feed in your WordPress blog?

Thomas has published quite a lot of articles on Medium in the last weeks. Many of the articles are copies of the articles published on www.thethomastories.com, but some of them are original content, written for Medium only.

thethomasstories on medium

Thomas would like to give more attention to the Medium articles, and therefore he wants to add a “latest posts on Medium” widget on his WordPress blog. How can that be done? He has been looking for a good plugin, but he didn’t really find one that satisfied him. So, what can Thomas do to include the latest posts from his Medium blog in a widget on his website?

There are a couple of solutions that do the job, and here Thomas will list some of them.

How to show the latest Medium posts in a WordPress blog!

First of all, the most important thing is to know the address of your Medium feed. Your feed is not the same as your Medium profile, but it is somewhat different. The address to your Medium feed is:

www.medium.com/feed/@profilename

For Thomas, the link to his Medium feed is: http://www.medium.com/feed/@thethomasstorie

Now that Thomas knows the address of his Medium feed, he copies this link, or stores it in an easily accessible place.

Include the Medium feed in WordPress

The next thing Thomas does is to enter the Widget settings under Appearance in WordPress. There is a basic widget there named RSS. But, unfortunately, RSS did not work with the Medium feed, it only gave him an error message. It said: “feed could not be found at https://medium.com/feed/@thethomasstorie. A feed with an invalid mime type may fall victim to this error, or SimplePie was unable to auto-discover it. Use force_feed() if you are certain this URL is a real feed.”

Instead of trying to understand this, Thomas went on and tried another plugin. He downloaded Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite, and activated the plugin.

Once again he entered the widgets menu, and he added Feedzy RSS to his widget bar. He added the Medium feed address, set the number of posts to show, and set the image size to 40. He then pressed save, and then what happened? The latest three Medium posts could be seen in the widget area of his WordPress blog.

Visitors can now see a widget presenting the latest Medium posts on Thomas' WordPress blog
Visitors can now see a widget presenting the latest Medium posts on Thomas’ WordPress blog

Thomas has fixed yet another problem, and he is very happy about it. Hopefully, he has been able to help you as well.

Should you have further comments or questions, use the comment field.

Want to read more interesting articles from Thomas? Make sure to follow him on Steemit, on Facebook, on Medium, on Twitter, on YouTube, and do not forget to visit www.thethomasstories.com.

How to see the value of Steemit upvotes on your articles?

Thomas has been writing some articles on Steemit, and he feels addicted to the platform. But, to gain even more audience, he has decided to use some voting bots to turn “Hot” or maybe even “Trending.” But, he isn’t sure about whether or not it is worth it. 

Thomas once visited DTube, and there he noticed that you can see the actual value of every single upvote as you press the upvote button. Or, you might not see the value of all the upvotes, but at least the most valuable upvotes. Now Thomas wants to find something similar for Steemit, as he wants to know whether the upvote bots give as much back as he pays for their upvotes.

See the value of Steemit upvotes

Let us say that Thomas pays 3 STD for an upvote using an upvote bot. Now 75% of the “income” goes to the author, while the rest is normally going out as curator fees. That means the value of the upvote of the bot should be at least 33% higher than what you pay if it is supposed to be a 0 project. If he wants it to be a plus project, it should be even higher. And considering that Thomas often uses SteemPress (which takes 15% of all income), it would be great if the upvote had even higher value.

Right now Thomas doesn’t care so much about the mathematics, he is simply interested in finding out whether or not there is a way to see the value of an upvote on his article and videos. And yes, he has found a way.

What Thomas does to see the value of Steemit votes

Whenever Thomas has written an article and he wants to see the value of the votes coming in, he visits SteemPeak. There he checks his own profile and hovers the mouse over the heart, and at once he can see the value of the upvotes on his article.

upvote value on steempeak
Thomas can now see the value of Steemit upvotes on his articles.

He uses this frequently to check out the value of different votes, and he is happy about the service. SteemPeak has several other useful functions as well, but Thomas hasn’t looked deeply into those yet. Maybe some other time.

Thomas is now getting a thorough overview of the value of the upvotes of bots and actual people reading his article. He finds it useful and he is very happy!

 

Thomas wants Google to Index his content NOW!

Thomas is writing his stories at www.thethomasstories.com, but it can take Google weeks to index his content. What can he do to make those lazy bots index his articles faster?

Thomas is a quite patient guy, at least if he gets what he wants right now. He never wants anything for Christmas, because at the moment he discovers that he is in need of something, he has already ordered it from Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress. He is a guy that gets things done, but he isn’t always understanding when other people delay his work… like Google does when they do not index his articles at once!

Thomas is extremely fed up with Google

Can you imagine? Thomas wrote an article about an event that took place a few days after the article was written. He came up with information about the event, where to park your car, ticket prices and more. But, nobody visited the article at all. Thomas felt like he had wasted his time, and he quickly understood why… Google hadn’t indexed the site, and it was impossible to find it in the search engine. What is the solution for Thomas?

In his despair, Thomas has found a solution! This is what he has done to make Google index his articles (normally) in a few minutes.

What Thomas does to make Google index his articles

  • Thomas has registered his website in the Google Search Console.
  • He has added a sitemap of his website in the Search Console.
  • Now he finds the URL of the article he wants Google to index.
  • He clicks on “Crawl” and then “Fetch as Google.”
  • He adds the URL of the article he wants Google to Index and presses “Fetch.”
  • He now clicks “Request Indexing” and follows the instructions.
  • The article should be indexed by Google within a few minutes/hours.

Thomas has found out that this works almost always. But, there is one exception. Thomas started to doubt this method as he noticed that several articles didn’t get indexed at once, and it could take days, even when he used the method.

index by google
What to press to make Google index your articles quickly!

But, Thomas believes that he understands what the keyword is… quality content!

Google indexing and quality

The times when it has taken Google days to index his content is when the quality of the content has been very similar to other websites online. The articles didn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before, and for that reason, the Google bot made a decision to put the article on hold for some days, as those looking for information can find all the information of the given article in other articles online anyway.

Now Thomas is ready to publish this article. He has worked a lot on it, and he has even prepared a little YouTube video with the instructions. After publishing, he will follow his very own instructions from this article, and then he will update this article to tell you how long it took Google to index the article.

Time from publishing to indexing by Google: 2 minutes

Have you found this article useful? Please share it with others.

Have you still got questions? Use the comment field!

How to find out when you are tagged on Steemit?

Thomas is getting popular on Steemit, and people mention him in articles and comments here and there. But, Thomas doesn’t get notified when he is mentioned on Steemit. What can he do?

He is looking around for different solutions, and luckily Thomas managed to find two. Since then he has discovered even more Steemit tools that will help him find out if he has been mentioned somewhere, but these are still his favorite tools at the moment.

Now Thomas will find out if you mention him on Steemit

  1. Thomas is using Busy.org
    This is a Steemit platform that has a different layout, and it includes several new tools. One of the most important is the notifications window in which you can see if you have been mentioned/tagged, and also if someone re-steem your posts.

    Notifications on Busy.org
    Notifications on Busy.org
  2. Thomas is using SteemWorld.org
    Here he can simply add his username and he will get notifications whenever someone follows him, mentions him, and lots of other stuff.

    Get Steemit notifications at SteemWorld
    Get Steemit notifications at SteemWorld

     

  3. Thomas is using Partiko on his mobile
    Besides these, there is an application named Partiko that can be used on mobile devices which does the job in a very good way.

Now Thomas is happy. Whenever someone mentions him on Steemit he gets a notification, and he can easily cope with all the comments and articles mentioning him.

 

 

 

How to publish old WordPress posts with SteemPress to Steemit?

Thomas has just installed Steem Press on his WordPress blog. From now on new posts will be published on Steemit automatically. But, is there a way to publish old posts as well?

Thomas is a happy and enthusiastic blogger. But, he loves spending his time wisely, and now he is looking for a way to publish his old WordPress posts to Steemit using SteemPress. It is great that the new posts will be published automatically after installing SteemPress, but what about the old posts?

Thomas has thought about the topic for a while, and he wonders if he should delete his old posts, copy the content, and then republish them all over again. In that way, the posts will be published to Steemit, and at the same time exist on the old blog like before. It could work, but it is not a very efficient method. Thomas isn’t happy with the solution.

Thomas gets ready to delete some old posts

While waiting for a better solution to show up, Thomas starts looking through some old posts. He wants to delete a couple of them, and that is when Thomas discovers an amazing little text.

Wow - I can publish to Steem from the post overview in WordPress!
Wow – I can publish to Steem from the post overview in WordPress!

While looking for something else, Thomas suddenly discovered the text “Publish to Steem” in the post overview. Here he can simply select old blog posts and press “Publish to Steem,” and the posts will be published automatically.

There is a maximum of one post per five minutes, so Thomas quickly discovers that it will take a while for all his posts to get published, but it is still a very efficient way to publish old WordPress posts to Steemit.

At first, the article doesn’t seem to get published. That is when Thomas realizes that he has set a delay for posts to be published on 2000 minutes in the SteemPress options. He decides to keep it this way, but at least he understands why the articles aren’t published on Steemit right away.

Thomas is very happy, and he looks forward to seeing his new and old blog posts on the Steemit platform.

Thomas on YouTube