I'm implementing the Google Indexing API for some job posts, and I have it working in "production" (sending url's that are preceded with my public domain i.e. "jobs.myproduction.com") but I can't figure out how to test it in any QA or integration environment. The domains of the links wouldn't be my verified domain (the public one) but rather something like "box1.qa.myproduction.com" and those URLs aren't even publicly accessible.
In other APIs, we'd have test keys and a test endpoint, we'd deploy those values into configuration tables all the way up the line so that throughout testing we're hitting a test API endpoint with a test key and we can see it working while NOT publishing test data to a production system. But Google doesn't seem to have that. It's either do it in production with production values or get constant failures.
Right now, on my dev machine, I have "localhost" urls for my job postings, those get rejected from the API call for what looks like the fact that it's "localhost". If I change it to a dummy domain "jobs.mytest.com", I get a 403 FORBIDDEN, presumably because I'm not a validated owner of the "jobs.mytest.com" domain.
I CAN get a 200 out of google if I use a subdomain above my verified domain. So I have verified domain "jobs.myproduction.com", if I send the url as "https://test.jobs.myproduction.com/jobs/whateverId" I can get a 200 back. But:
- I don't know where that's going (the domain isn't valid so I assume google won't list it)
- I wouldn't put it above Google to somehow ding me for submitting bad URLs, and
- This doesn't seem to be the right way to do this at all.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to get around this? Am I missing something in the Google API dashboard for test accounts?
