When I rebuilt my site as plain PHP pages on shared hosting, I spent weeks on the downloader itself — the resolve endpoint, the download proxy, the quality list. Then one day I searched for my own site on Google and the result showed a plain grey globe instead of my logo. Everything worked. The site was fast, the pages were indexed. But in a list of search results, my site looked like nobody owned it.

The cause was a one-line mistake I had never thought about: there was no favicon.

What a favicon actually is

A favicon is the little icon a browser shows in the tab, in bookmarks, and — this is the part I missed — next to your pages in Google's search results. When a browser loads a page, it looks for a link like this in the <head> :

<link rel= "icon" href= "/favicon.ico" >

Enter fullscreen mode

Exit fullscreen mode

If that tag is missing, most browsers still guess. They request /favicon.ico from the root of your site automatically.…