How to make your Artstation pages appear in Google search (2022)

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Introduction

I'm on Artstation because I've made art and Artstation is the place to be if you want people to discover your art! But Artstation is also crowded with art, so how can you make it easier for people to discover your art? The answer is that you want your Artstation pages to appear in Google search because that's what people use when they are in need of something: they google it! I also want my Artstation pages to appear in Google search - but I realized to my horrors that I couldn't find all my pages when I googled them myself. Not good! Why is Google not indexing by Artstation pages? 

How can you check if your Artstation pages are in Google search? To figure out if a website is in Google search you can google the url to the website like this: 

  • site:www.yoursite.com and Google will tell you how many pages belonging to that website are in Google search 
  • You can also google a single page belonging to a website like this: site:www.yoursite.com/subPage

What should you google to find out if your Artstation page is in Google search? You can't use site:www.artstation.com because it will tell you how many of ALL Artstation pages are in Google search (the answer is 8.6 million)! So what you should do is to Google each individual Artstation page which you can find if you go to your profile and click on one of your art pieces. It should look like this: www.artstation.com/artwork/oA0RgW, so google site:www.artstation.com/artwork/oA0RgW to see if it is in Google search. But Artstation also has another folder structure, so you can also Google site:YourNameOnArtstation.artstation.com, so I google site:eriknordeus.artstation.com.

Now if you realized to your horrors that you can't find your own site on Google what can you do? Once upon a time you could send individual links to Google and tell Google to index them - but that feature was unfortunately removed. And Artstation's help section won't help you in any way! So to make Google index your Artstation pages you need links to those pages because Google is powered by links! 

But you might say your Artstation pages already have links from your profile page artstation.com/YourNameOnArtstation. That is true, which is why Google automatically adds some of your Artstation pages on Google. But that only happens if your Artstation profile is popular enough - otherwise Google might not visit your profile and discover those links because Google can't go through all billion websites in the world every single day. So what you need to do is to create your own links.

How do you create your own links? All links on the Internet are not of equal value: 

  • A good link looks something like this: <a href="www.yourwebsite.com">Your website</a>. This link (if Google finds it), will most likely make the website appear on Google search. I say most likely because Google has other parameters it considers so it doesn't index whatever site. For example, you need text on the website or Google won't index it because Google is a machine and doesn't understand just images. 
  • A bad link looks like this: <a href="www.yourwebsite.com" rel="nofollow">Your website</a>. This is bad because of the nofollow attribute. If Google notices the nofollow attribute, Google will not continue to that link and your website will not be discovered by Google from that link. Some websites, such as GitHub, adds these attributes automatically because Google can punish your website if you link to bad websites! 

How do you check if a link is good or bad? You can (at least in Chrome) right-click on the link and then choose inspect and a new window should pop up with the information.   

If you can't figure out how to add good links somewhere, what's left for you to do is to create your own website, or a blog like this one, and create all the links you need. BUT make sure to not create a million blogs with links to your Artstation because Google may punish that spammy behavior!

But isn't this a chicken and the egg problem? You need links to your Artstation pages because your Artstation page is not popular. But if your Artstation is not popular, why would your blog be? How will Google find your blog? The difference is that you own your blog or website, and if you own your website you can use a Google tool called Google Search Console. If you register your blog on Google Search Console you can tell Google to search your blog while going through all the links you have on it! Success!

Apply what we have learned

Now will this actually work? Let's make an experiment by using my own Artstation!

Notice that testing if every single link is in Google and link to it from blogger is very boring so make sure you listen to something cool in the background while drinking wine or beer if you are into that!  

If I google "site:eriknordeus.artstation.com" Google tells me it has indexed 9 pages even though I have 14 art pieces on Artstation (so with the profile page I should have a total of 15 links on Google search). So let's link the missing ones from eriknordeus.artstation.com (❌ means not indexed and ✅ means it's on Google):

One set of links ready, now over to the ones that you have to search for one-by-one - the ones linked from: artstation.com/eriknordeus (❌ means not indexed and ✅ means it's on Google):

And now we have to wait and see if this produces a result! In the future you (and I) should write a single blog post to each art piece because Google likes those links more than these link roundups! 

Update: 4 days later

When I now google "site:eriknordeus.artstation.com" 10 sites appear (previously it was 9). But the new page is NOT one of the pages I linked to, but a new one: the Resume page (which I forgot existed, so a total of 16 pages should be shown in Google search).

When I check the pages I have to google one-by-one, this is the result:

So 2 new pages have been indexed! I've added new content to "Tesla Motors Simulator props" but I haven't touched "Disco elf Corel," so I tell myself the linking from this blog post worked. Slow and steady wins the race!

Update: 13 days later

When I now google "site:eriknordeus.artstation.com," then 11 pages appear. It was previously 10 pages, and the new one is "Butterfly elf Madeliefje."

When I check the pages I have to google one-by-one, this is the result: ALL PAGES INDEXED!!! One of them can't be found by typing site:url - only by typing just the url in Google, but at least it has been indexed! This may be a takeaway: maybe it's better to just google the page itself without using site:url if you want to investigate just one specific page. BUT if you want to check all pages on a site you have to use site:url. I tried to type in the pages you find from "eriknordeus.artstation.com/..." individually without using site, but none were found in Google. 

So I guess slow and steady won the race! 

Update: 1 month later

When I now google "site:eriknordeus.artstation.com" 14 sites appear (previously it was 10). Two are still missing but we are getting there!

Summary

For Google to index you Artstation pages, Google's crawling algorithm has to visit them from somewhere. Because Artstation is so big, it's easy for Google to miss your pages when visiting Artstation. To help Google discover your pages you need to create the links to your pages yourself. It's very important that you create these links on a page you "own," because then you can tell Google to index that page by using the Google Search Console. When Google is indexing the page you created, it will automatically visit the links from that page to your Artstation pages and thus index those pages as well. This will not happen over night - it took me two weeks before my pages were indexed by Google. So have patience! 

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