Despite valiant effort – blog not appearing in Google search
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I’ve read articles until my eyes are bleeding, and my site has been up for at least three months, and still…. nothing.
Here’s what I’ve tried:
– My site is public
– Google search console account with both http and https variants
– Submitting sitemap to Google search console
– Adding categories and tags to posts
– Adding a front page meta description complete with juicy keywords
– Popping in site verification service for Google
– Making sure at least four content rich posts are up
– Linking between postsOddly, searching for ‘howtodateasuper’ will pull up the ‘About’ page, as well as the placeholder entries that came with my default theme, but which I have since deleted. *eyeroll* But none of my actual posts will show up. Do I need to upgrade my subscription so I can do some back end tinkering?
Any additional advice (or looking at my code) would be awesome.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi,
Do I need to upgrade my subscription so I can do some back end tinkering?
No. It’s not guaranteed that every post on a relatively new site will be indexed by Google. The post “The Definitive Guide to Caring for Your Super’s Suit,” published two days ago is indexed, and that may be a sign that Google will indexed shortly after publishing. Google has also indexed your homepage, the howtodateasuper (“Olive Foster”) author archives page, at least one tag archives page (diy), and this forum topic, the last of which was published today.
The average daily volume of traffic to the site and to individual posts and pages will undoubtedly be a significant factor in how quickly posts are indexed by Google. Did the last post receive more traffic than previous posts? I would proceed on as you have been. Web surfers and Google will find you eventually.
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Correction:
“…and that may be a sign that Google will be indexing future posts on the site shortly after publishing.” -
Hey, thank you musicdoc1! You’re right, that post does seem to be well connected. It’s not that it had more traffic, persay, but it was liked by some other WP bloggers. Maybe that’s what did it.
I was hoping to delay announcing this little project to friends and family until I was sure they’d be able to find it on Google, but maybe once I announce it to them, they WILL be able to find it. *shrug*
I had only put up “The Definitive Guide” as a way of allowing my friends to look at it, it’s still technically under construction. If I revert it to a draft, do you think I’ll undo all the hard work that Google’s done to get it listed?
And since it looks like Google’s got the hang of me now, would deleting and re-publishing my previous posts help?
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You’re welcome!
If I revert it to a draft, do you think I’ll undo all the hard work that Google’s done to get it listed?
Reverting it to draft will result in 404 errors until you republish it. By the time you republish it Google may have dropped it from search results. I wouldn’t recommend doing that, but I’ve done it myself and understand why you’d want to do it. In the short term it may have negative effects wrt Google, but in the long run it won’t have significant impact.
would deleting and re-publishing my previous posts help?
I don’t think so. The earlier posts will likely be eventually picked up by Google. Publishing of the same content twice on the same site is something that Google disapproves of.
Btw, I noticed that the post “The Declaration of Blog-dependence. Inde-blog-dence? Blogdependence” is indexed by Google, but I only found it by searching on the post title, not on the site URL.
Also, the same Google search gave as a result a link to all three of the posts published in June, via a link to the June 2016 archives page.
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