Blog Over 1 Yr Old, Not Indexed – Search Console Says is Unknown to Google
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Hi. I have a WordPress blog that’s mostly book reviews:
https://rorschachianreview.wordpress.com
It’s over a year old and is not indexed in Google at all, not even the home page (although it’s in Bing, Yahoo and Ecosia). I submitted a sitemap, but I think this is done by WordPress anyway.
When I checked Google search console in July it showed every URL as “Excluded”. 13 said “Discovered – currently not indexed” and 2 “Crawled – currently not indexed”.
When I looked today and checked the home page on search console it now says:
Page is not indexed: URL is unknown to Google
Sitemaps N/A
Referring page None detected
URL might be known from other sources that are currently not reported
Last crawl N/A
Crawled as N/A
Crawl allowed? N/A
Page fetch N/A
Indexing allowed?
info N/A
Indexing User-declared canonical N/A
Google-selected canonical N/AUnder “Indexing allowed?” there’s an “i” sign for information but it’s not clickable.
I really think this is a technical issue of some kind but I don’t know why, it’s just an ordinary WordPress blog.
Can anyone suggest what this means and why Google is stopping it from being indexed?
Thanks.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I should have said, there are also no manual actions, security issues, etc showing on search console.
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I should have said, there are also no manual actions, security issues, etc showing on search console.
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Hi there,
Firstly, I’ve taken a look at your site, and I don’t see anything wrong with how it is displayed and there seems to be nothing that is impeding people’s ability to visit it. Additionally you can verify that the sitemap is included in your robots.txt file, and Google is only disallowed from crawling specific “non-public” pages like your admin and login pages: https://rorschachianreview.wordpress.com/robots.txt
Unfortunately we do not have control over what Google does on their end, and do not have any insights into why you are seeing your site pages as “excluded” and when I look for info on this online, it seems that can be for any number of reasons, most of which are not under our direct control. This 3rd party guide to Google Search Console has a pretty good breakdown of that.
I really think this is a technical issue of some kind but I don’t know why, it’s just an ordinary WordPress blog.
I totally agree with you here. Your blog does not have any red flags that I can see, and all settings are normal on this end. Sites like this are readily indexed by Google so I can’t see any obvious cause for the issue here. Have you tried Google Support to confirm that something is not wrong on their end? https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/new?source=need_more_help
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HI. Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I did ask on the Google help forum before, but the only suggestion I got was to add an About page and change the layout of the blog. But I don’t think it’s anything to do with content. I submitted an indexing request for the home page through search console today but I don’t know if that actually works or if it just speeds up the indexing of something that was going to get indexed anyway.
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Looking at your site, you are only posting once a month, or less (on average) over the last year.
Post a bit more often…
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I don’t know, I can see how posting more frequently might help in rankings or getting indexed more quickly, but would this actually prevent it from being indexed in the first place? There must be many websites that are updated infrequently or not at all. This is actually my second blog and you’ll understand if it’s not enticing to post on it even more frequently when there are no visitors, Google hasn’t indexed it in a year and even search console is saying its never even heard of it!
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Hello there,
I’ve taken a look at your stats and I can see that Google is a referrer: https://wordpress.com/stats/day/referrers/cinemaessentials.wordpress.com?startDate=2022-09-10&summarize=1&num=30
Which means it has been indexed.
With that in mind I can recommend this guide here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic/ on how to drive traffic to a site and increase readership.
I hope this helps.
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Hello there,
Ah thank you for pointing that out.
I’ve taken a look at the referrers there also and it looks like Google has referred (indexed) this site also: https://wordpress.com/stats/day/referrers/rorschachianreview.wordpress.com?startDate=2022-09-10&summarize=1&num=7 :)
I’m hoping this adds some reassurance. :)
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I think that’s new. I got an email today from Google with this message:
Google systems confirm that on September 8, 2022 we started collecting Google Search impressions for your website in Search Console. This means that pages from your website are now appearing in Google search results for some queries.
I submitted an index request for the home page through search console a couple of days ago. So maybe that finally worked.
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