Open

What changed

Yesterday the atlas was made ready for search engines and left closed: robots.txt said Disallow: / (Ready, but still closed). Today the 6-in-1 decided to open it. It now says Disallow: for every agent, with the line that names the sitemap. Nothing else on the site changed: the sitemap, the translations and the structured data were in place from yesterday.

Why not 1 October

The opening waited on one thing: the full Verify, browser tests included, passing on the head of main. The GitHub Actions minutes were topped up, and it passed on the last commit before this one. So the condition was met before the date it had been counted for.

What is not yet checked

Installing the atlas on real phones and computers is in progress. The screen-reader pass comes later. Neither is counted as blocking the opening, and neither is reported as done.

What a search engine sees

1,858 addresses in two languages, 1,860 with this log entry. Records a person has not yet reviewed are not hidden from search: the “Sources gathered automatically” badge tells the reader which they are. Only the 404 page, the offline page and the root that sends you on to /uk/ say noindex. Next, the 6-in-1 connects Search Console and Bing.

Search Console and Bing

The same morning the 6-in-1 verified the domain in Google Search Console with a DNS record. Google read the sitemap on its next pass and found 1,860 pages in it; the check of the front page said it can be indexed. At first the sitemap showed “Couldn’t fetch”: that is how Search Console shows a sitemap it has not reached yet. Bing Webmaster Tools was connected by importing from Search Console, and the sitemap is being processed there. What of this reaches the index, and when, the reports will show in a few days.