Getting onto Google (and Bing, and Duckduckgo etc.)
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Hello! I’ve done the reading and followed all the instructions — most obviously, making sure that my site is in the ‘public’ as opposed to the private or coming soon modes. The site was launched months ago, and yet there is absolutely no trace of it on Google or any of the other search engines. I’m starting to think that there is some ‘master switch’ that I’ve not yet identified – or that someone else has thrown – and which needs to be reset in order to get search engines to notice my website. I have been thinking of upgrading, but unless this problem can be solved, I’m not happy to pay extra! Any help or advice very gratefully received!
The site I need help with is lindahlelliots.wordpress.com.
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Hi,
Just to clarify, these are the instructions you’ve followed?
https://wordpress.com/support/seo/
When you search for your site, what terms are you using to search?
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Hi, many thanks for your help!
In response to your queries, I have looked up SEO in other webpages, but will have a look at the link you suggest as well. Beyond putting the website in the ‘public’ mode, here are the things that I think the site does that conform to SEO good practice:
— the website is distinctive and ‘authoritative’
— the architecture and overall design is clear and easy to use
— there are lots of ‘self-references’ within the site’s ecology
— until the last couple of posts, I’ve used logical tags and categories (this may need some tweaking). (More recently I’ve simply stopped because it didn’t seem to be getting the site anywhere)
— the site also has lots of hyperlinks to google maps and other sites.
— while I need to optimise the size of several of the photographs, I wouldn’t have thought that what is there is likely to overwhelm most users’ internet capacity/speedIn relation to your question about Google, I tried several versions of site:https://lindahlelliots.wordpress.com (on google search) and was told each time that the site didn’t appear to exist…
Hope that helps to clarify what gives… Thanks again for your help!
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Looking at your site, it only was made public a week ago. Search engines (including Google) can take 4-6 weeks or more to index and show any newly created sites in their search index.
Since this indexing isn’t something that we control, you will need to wait for Google and other search indexes to crawl and index your site.
I hope that clarifies things.
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Thank you csonnek, but actually the website has been up for months. In fact, I had the same issue with an earlier url of the website, which was launched in mid-September 2020. Somewhat mysteriously, as soon as I swapped the previous ‘incarnation’ for the present url (both on the same wordpress account), the older version appeared briefly on google searches (!?). So recency is not the issue (wish it was!!).
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Google cannot index the web in real-time, in our experience, it takes them weeks if not months to index new sites.
Since the site in question was just made public a week ago, it will take some time.
You can track their progress by verifying it in their search console: https://wordpress.com/support/webmaster-tools/
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My reply was to yours above. :)
I understand the site itself was created September 17, 2020, but the site was only made public on June 10, 2021.
So, as far as search engines are concerned, your site is only a week old, and search engines generally take weeks if not months to index new sites.
You can track their progress, and receive advice directly from them, by verifying your site in their search consoles: https://wordpress.com/support/webmaster-tools/
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Oh dear! I think (or thought!) it was long before that but if you’re right then all will be resolved soon… Thank you again for your feedback!
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ps on second thought: there was one page/post that I did set as private, and then made public. But definitely not the whole website… Again, I will check again in two or so week’s time.
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On ‘third’ thought, this is the page that I initially kept private, and then published:
https://lindahlelliots.wordpress.com/new-york/
More importantly, before that, friends and family could peruse the different pages and posts with no password whatsoever. The same was true for the earlier url.
So actually, it can’t be a case of my having inadvertently kept everything in the private mode!
I’d be happy, indeed relieved to be shown that it was some other form of incompetence ;-) but I don’t think that was simply keeping the website in private mode.
Once again, very grateful for all and any help.
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Signing off for today. Three thoughts:
1) I’d like to believe that the issue is one of my lack of expertise, eg having inadvertently hit the ‘private’ button. If so, how to explain that friends and family whom I provided with urls (note the plural) had no problem accessing the websites without a password….
2) It goes almost without saying that my website may well be of interest to only a tiny group of people. But the same was/is true of other websites I’ve produced. So why the deafening silence now…
3) I reject, in principle, conspiracy theories. But conspiracy theories are not always wrong…
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That page was also private before, but our logs definitely show the whole site being set as public on on June 10, 2021.
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Thanks macmanx, presumably your logs go further back than June 10? Because if they do they will show that all the rest of the pages and the website as a whole was not only public since April (and before that in the earlier version), but was being used by individuals without any access codes. I don’t know how to upload screenshots on this forum but presumably you can see the hits for yourself.
My understanding from this gist of this conversation is that basically WordPress doesn’t know why Google et al are not indexing my site. I’d like to be shown that I made a mistake as simple as the one suggested above (that would be easy to solve!), but I’m increasingly inclined to believe that actually there is something far beyond my website and/or my use of the control panel at stake…
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There’s no conspiracy here. Your site has had various periods over the past 9 months where the site itself was set to private (meaning search engine indexing bots will not index your site) or the site itself was public, but many of your site’s pages were set to private (which again, indexing bots won’t index the content).
Your site could have been set to public but set to “Do not allow search engines to index my site” which would have told these indexing bots to skip indexing your site.
WordPress.com doesn’t control whether or not search engines index your site – you do based upon the settings you choose in your site’s admin area. And up until recently, you had a lot of content set to private.
Doing a quick Google search, you can request a indexing of your site instead of waiting for their bots to eventually get to it. You can find those instructions for Google here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/ask-google-to-recrawl
That page does note that “Requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all.” so be aware you may still have to wait for them to update their index.
If you do a similar search for the other internet search providers you might bring up a similar process.
Again, we don’t control what search engines index, so you need to look to the search engines themselves to see why your site isn’t being updated properly.
I hope that clarifies things.
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Csonnek and Macmanx, I have to say that both of your responses have been unhelpful. I now also sense an element of hostility.
1. Anyone reading your responses would come away with the sense that this was a highly ‘unstable’ website from the point of view of the public/private issue, i.e. that the website was effectively coming and going. This is simply not the case. The vast majority of the website, under both urls, was public and stayed public, as well as freely accessible, for at least a couple of months (in the case of the current url, it’s been going for three months). To be sure, presumably many web users keep at least some of their pages private for at least part of the time and that has no effect on indexing. The same must be true for anyone who momentarily sets the whole website on private and then resets back to its earlier setting of public.
To reiterate the point, all but a handful of pages have been public, and have been used by other people with no code whatsoever, for months. This must be evident in the logs you are examining, and so I’m surprised that you’re latching on to the public/private thing to explain away the issue.
2. It was perhaps a mistake to use the word ‘conspiracy’. I meant it in the sense of an unannounced scheme, stratagem or machination (I could go on…) on the part of Google (for example) to effectively force people to become paying customers, or customers with accounts. E.g. unless you pay us, or acquire an account with us etc., it may be years before we bother to index your website. To me that really is *conspiratorial* given how the web is, or was supposed to work. I am, however, not so delusional as to believe that it is anything ‘personal’, or a matter of some little cabal out to ‘get’ any particular websites. I would imagine (but I may be wrong) that you both would acknowledge that there are awful lot of things happening in relation to algorithms, search engines, etc. that do not operate on the basis of the principles claimed in public by big tech.
Be that as it may, I will not be communicating about this any further because I think your responses have not only been unhelpful, but to an extent, also ‘politely hostile’. I thank you for your time, and will now be looking for another way of making my website public.
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Hi, if it’s okay, privacy issues aside, I’d like to jump in and make a few recommendations getting you into search engines, based on what works well here.
1) Add Webmaster Tools for a search engine or two: https://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/ — that way if they’re seeing any issues with your content, they can let you know.
2) When adding new posts, ensure you’re using no more than 15 total tags and categories per posts. Treat that as a limit, rather than a target, and use only the most relevant terms. Also, if you’re using subcategories: if I had
shapes>polygons>rectangles>squaresand I put an item in squares, that would count as four categories. This won’t affect search engines directly, but it may affect your visibility within our reader, which may affect how often other people are sharing your site — which may affect search engines.3) Finding the right level of specificity for a tag or category is helpful, too. I’d recommend mixing it up with a few very specific tags, a few somewhat specific, and something more general. Try to think of these not as search engine terms (those will mostly come from your post title and content) but topics that people follow. More tips here:
https://wordpress.com/support/topics/I just happened to notice you’re using the same terms as tags AND categories for some posts. If you don’t have to do that, I’d recommend against it.
4) For more discoverability (again, not direct SEO but can influence it in long run), have you considered publicizing to social media? We have tips on that here:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/publicize/None of these tips will land you at the top of search engines overnight, but they should help improve your visibility time as you add new posts. We have a few more traffic tips here:
https://wordpress.com/support/getting-more-views-and-traffic/I hope this helps.
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Supernovia many, many thanks. I’m very grateful for your suggestions. Also to say thanks to csonnek and macmanx for looking into the matter; I may not agree with your assessment of the significance of the public/private thing but I do know you were trying to help!
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Cheers @lindahlelliotsagas. I did just notice one more thing as I was looking at the site. I’m not sure how much search engines care, but they might: your site doesn’t have any primary navigation links, as they’re all in the content further down the page. (noting that WILL affect people who use screen readers)
Have you considered setting up a menu?
https://wordpress.com/support/menus/You can add category links to that too to make it easier to find your content, since you do have plenty there to work with!
All of those recommendations, except the last general one about our traffic article, are based on things I saw as I looked at your site. I’d be curious to know how this goes once you’ve tried those strategies for a few months. This thread will be closed by then, but if you’re having any trouble at all still, you can link back to this so we can see what you’ve tried.
Really hoping it all helps and that everyone who is looking for this information will be able to find it easily soon. Cheers!
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(sorry, one more thing!)
A few more general tags you might consider using:
history
genealogyAlso, since your site is set to English, Spanish tags may be less successful. But it doesn’t hurt to mention the terms in your posts: like if you’ll have a section in Spanish and want to use that term as a header there, you could.
Anyway. That should be enough to go on for now. Best of luck!
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