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Site analytics and SEO

CubeDynamics supports Google Analytics 4 for aggregate site usage and Google Search Console for indexing diagnostics. The documentation build also provides canonical URLs, per-page descriptions, social-sharing metadata, structured software metadata, robots.txt, and an XML sitemap.

Activate Google Analytics

Do not reuse the measurement IDs from analytics-library or data-library. Those are separate GA4 data streams, and reusing either one would mix unrelated traffic.

  1. In Google Analytics, create a web data stream for https://cu-esiil.github.io/cubedynamics/.
  2. Copy its measurement ID, which has the form G-XXXXXXXXXX.
  3. In the GitHub repository, open Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → Variables.
  4. Create a repository variable named CUBEDYNAMICS_GA_MEASUREMENT_ID and set it to the new measurement ID.
  5. Run the Pages workflow, or merge a change to main, and confirm a visit in the Analytics Realtime report.

The Pages workflow passes that repository variable into MkDocs. If the variable is absent, the site emits no Google Analytics request. The configured tag also disables Google Signals and advertising-personalization signals.

Connect Google Search Console

The repository includes the same HTML verification file already used by other CU-ESIIL GitHub Pages sites. After deployment:

  1. Add the URL-prefix property https://cu-esiil.github.io/cubedynamics/ in Search Console.
  2. Select the HTML file verification method and confirm the deployed file is available at https://cu-esiil.github.io/cubedynamics/google21782db4655ca373.html.
  3. Submit https://cu-esiil.github.io/cubedynamics/sitemap.xml in the Sitemaps panel.

What to monitor

Use Analytics to follow engaged sessions, popular documentation pages, vignette entry points, referral sources, and search terms used within the site. Use Search Console to follow indexed pages, search queries, click-through rate, mobile usability, and crawl errors.

Treat traffic as evidence about navigation and discoverability, not as a direct measure of scientific impact. Avoid collecting user-level identifiers or adding advertising features without a separate privacy review.

Relevant Google documentation