Blog not showing up when searched for in google etc

  • Unknown's avatar
    adreamsgreetingscards · Member ·

    Good afternoon,

    This is a blog/site I have created for a friend of mine. It went live in February and is set to public. Also, I have shared the link on my own social media and nobody had problems accessing it.

    However if a third party puts “adreamsgreetingscards” or even “adreamsgreetingscards.wordpress.com” into a search engine it does not show up and I cannot work out why. I have discovered that my friend’s phone is autocorrecting by adding spaces after the periods in the address which explains why she can’t get directly to the site, but not why it won’t show up on a search engine.

    Does anyone have any idea what’s going on?

    Thank you in advance.

    https://adreamsgreetingscards.wordpress.com/

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    I can confirm that your site is public on the internet, and fully visible to search engines.

    It does not seem that Google has indexed this site, and I’m not sure why that would be the case but there is nothing on our end preventing this. We’re not in control of what Google does on their end, but it may be the case that the site has low enough traffic that it has not caught their attention.

    In cases like this what we recommend that you take the extra step of registering your site with Google directly, to encourage them to list it in search results. You can do that by following the steps here: https://wordpress.com/support/site-verification-services/#google-search-console

    In addition, this will help you to understand some of the basics of what you can do to increase the amount of traffic to your site: https://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic/

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.

  • Unknown's avatar
    adreamsgreetingscards · Member ·

    Thank you for your reply and apologies for not responding sooner. I’ve tried to follow the steps but I can’t get google to recognise the html tag (I have a screenshot but I’m reluctant to upload that to another site in order to share it – but it says

    Verification method: HTML tag
    Failure reason: We couldn’t find your verification meta tag.

    I realise you’ve only got my word that I’ve done it correctly but I’ve done this process before (though not for some years) and I followed the instructions exactly.

    I’ve also tried the “upload an html tag” option but wordpress says it won’t allow this file type? I admit though, I’m far less certain that I’m doing that one correctly – though the file that google downloads for me to upload ends in .txt which confused me somewhat.

    I can only assume I’ve done something strange somewhere that I’m unaware of! Have you got any further suggestions please? Otherwise I shall ask a webdesigner friend to check the back end of the site…

  • staff-blorbo · Staff ·

    The meta tag is definitely added properly and visible in your site’s code, so Google should be noticing.

    I’ve experienced myself Google taking a bit of time to notice. Personally, I’d take this approach:

    1. Get a fresh tag from Google and add it following the steps at https://wordpress.com/support/site-verification-services/#google-search-console

    2. Wait an hour, keeping the verification tab open.

    3. After that hour, click verify, and it should go through.

  • Unknown's avatar
    adreamsgreetingscards · Member ·

    Thanks for the help. Google definitely hates this blog though – I’ve actually left it a full day and then tried again and I still get this:

    Verification method:
    HTML tag
    Failure reason:
    We couldn’t find your verification meta tag.
    Please fix your implementation and reverify, or use another verification method.

    Incidentally, I’m not sure what you mean about a fresh tag – no matter how many times I try the process it always gives the exact same tag.

    Can you advise how I can upload the .html tag to wordpress (and how I can download it from google in a format that doesn’t end in .txt) so I can try that method instead please?

    Sorry about this!

  • Unknown's avatar
    adreamsgreetingscards · Member ·

    Okay, ignore my previous message – I closed the google window, reopened it, put the website address in again and NOW it says

     Ownership auto verified
    Verification method:
    HTML tag
    To stay verified, don’t remove the meta tag from your site’s home page. To avoid losing verification, you may want to add multiple verification methods from the Settings > Ownership verification.
    DONE

    I think we can mark this as resolved, thank you!

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