Domain registration and subsequent DNS issues

Hello, I hope you’re all well.

I’ve come back to Netlify after 2 years and have successfully deployed my site (alessandroconway.netlify.app). However, I am unable to have it be found by google etc (site:mywebsite yields no hits).

After following several threads in the forum, I’ve identified that I have not registered my domain (on netlify under my team → domains → add or register domain). When i go do this, it says “A DNS zone for this domain already exists under a different account”. I don’t have any other accounts, and have seen that I need to add a TXT file for netlify to authenticate my ownership on my host (GitHub), which I am unsure where to place. I don’t have any custom domain name, the netlify.app subdomain works fine for me.

Could you kindly spell out the necessary steps to get my website recognised by google searches? For instance:

  1. add the .txt file in GitHub–> where?
  2. Have my website ownership authenticated by Netlify
  3. Register domain on Netlify’s ‘Domains’ tab
  4. Connect my domain to Google’s DNS through adding another .txt file to GitHub? Google Search Console recommends adding an HTML file to the website, i presume that’s to the Github host, but am not sure where that goes too.

Thank you very much!

Hey there!

I think you may be a little confused.

alessandroconway.netlify.app is a subdomain of Netlify. If this is the site you use, this is not a custom domain, and you will not be able to add/register it.

If you choose to purchase a customer domain in the future, such as www.yourname.com, then you will be able to add it in that section. There is no need to create a TXT record as we only use those for custom domains.

Let me know if you have any other questions. Thanks!

Thank you very much for clearing that up!

All the best!