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I use Google Docs rather than a blog to write articles and I'd like them to be readable by the public. But I've never seen Google Docs results in Google Search results.

  1. Is it possible?

  2. How do I make it appear?

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4 Answers 4

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You can use Google Docs as your writing tool, but you will have to use a blogging platform as your publishing tool.

There are a few options for this.

  1. The simplest is to write a post in Docs, copy the content and paste it into a blog post. I'm not sure how well this will work in the different blogging platforms. I did test a few years back whether it works in Blogger - and it did provided the formatting wasn't too complex. (My previous results are described here.)
  2. Another option is to use Docs "Publish to the web" feature. To do this, first share your Doc as Public on the Web. Then choose File > Publish to the web, go to the Embed tab, and copy the code provided. Then do to your blogging platform, make a new post, go into HTML mode in the post-editor and paste the code in. Publish that. (You will need to put in the post-title manually.)
  3. Another option is to combine the Email as Attachment feature from Docs, and the post-by-email feature of a blogging platform. You might have to experiment to see how well this works: I just tried it with a very simple Doc and Blogger, and it showed the content of the post as well as a link to the embedded document. More testing would be needed here, I think.

One constraint on all of these approaches is that they will not work well, or at all, with images. I cannot think of any way around this, apart from manually adding them to your posts after you have published them from Docs.

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  • That reminded me of using Google Sites to embed a Google Doc. But even then the document doesn't get indexed it seems. Oh well, back to using my Mediawiki installation with copy-paste like you said.
    – Sridhar Sarnobat
    Jul 31, 2015 at 0:43
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I don't think it is possible, because when I look in the Advanced Search form, there is a drop-down list of file types which doesn't include gdocs:

enter image description here

However, it is possible to look for an MS Office document.

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How to

  1. Publish the Google document to the web.
  2. Ask Google to crawl the published document.

UPDATE:

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289#request_indexing

(October 14, 2020) Request Indexing is temporarily unavailable. We are making some technical updates, and it should be available again soon

References

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There is a way to do this, however it requires using a third-party service: Sourceful. You can submit your Google doc here

The submitted page will appear in Google search results.

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  • Not sure why this is downvoted. Thanks for the info
    – Sridhar Sarnobat
    May 23, 2020 at 20:50

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