my site doesn't show up on search engines
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Hi Alan,
I’m glad that worked for you! That step of the process can be a little tricky.
As long as your site was successfully verified with Google, you’re all set from this end and just need to wait for Google finish processing the site. Since that’s up to Google, I’m not sure exactly how long it will take — your best bet is to check Google’s help site for more details. This page has some information about your site being listed in Google’s search results:
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I did go to Google’s help site, and couldn’t find any more information there. I tried to take the step of asking Google to crawl my site, but perhaps I misunderstood that function because it didn’t seem to work.
If you could answer one more question, it would be helpful. Should taking the steps I have taken here – that is, entering the information I have now on the available tools page — by itself cause Google to index my site, since for some reason it doesn’t seem to have done that in the month or so that it’s been up?
Again, I’m confused about this simply because all the other WordPress sites I’ve done have been found and indexed almost immediately by Google.
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Alan,
Asking Google to crawl your site encourages Google to look at your site and add it to their search results. The steps you took here let you add your site to Google’s search console so you can ask Google to crawl your site and see any errors or messages from Google about your site. That’s the best way to find out more about why Google isn’t adding your site to their search results, given that everything on this end is set up to allow it.
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I have a related question that perhaps you could answer. First, would adding tags to my site help? And if so, how do I do that on pages? All of my pages are pages, not posts, and I couldn’t find instructions for adding tags to pages.
Or for that matter, can I add tags at some meta level so that they apply to the whole site?
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Hi Alan,
Tags are specifically for blog posts, so there isn’t a way to add them to pages or to the site as a whole. Your best bet at this stage is to use Google’s Search Console to get more details about how Google sees your site and check to see if they have any suggestions for making sure your site is listed in their search results.
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Okay. Could you give me some hints on how to use Google’s Search Console, that is, what I’m supposed to be looking for regarding how Google sees the site and how to check to see if they have any suggestions for making sure the site is listed?
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Hi Alan,
I’d recommend getting to know how Google’s Search Console works here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters?hl=en#topic=3309469
Their Are you on Google? article includes details about how to check to see if your site is listed in Google’s search results.
Since WordPress.com can’t control how Google decides to list your site in their search results, I don’t know exactly what you’ll need to check or whether something needs to be changed in order to have your site listed there. (It’s also possible that Google just needs a little more time before your site shows up in their results.) If those links above don’t have the information you need, you can also get additional support for using their search console and getting your site listed there.
I hope this helps!
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I will try your suggestions. The two other sites I’ve created using wordpress, all essentially page sites rather than blogs, have been listed almost immediately and near the top of google results for key phrases in their content.
This site is not listed at all, anywhere, even though it’s been up for about 6 weeks now.
Thanks for all your help
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I’m not getting anywhere with Google yet, but I’ll keep working on it. I wanted to let you know that I just now tried searching on Bing and Yahoo, which I think are the next most popular after Google, and seeingtheforest.org comes up second on both of those search engines, which would seem to indicate that there’s nothing basically wrong with the site.
Can you offer any explanation of why this would be? That is, it comes up second on those two search engines, but Google doesn’t even recognize that it exists?
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To add to the mystery, I just tried searching on the Google Chrome browser, and again, seeingtheforest.org comes up second in the search results. I tried searching in Firefox, still using the Google search engine, and seeingtheforest.org comes up second in the search results.
At least I have narrowed the problem down, but now it seems even harder to fix. It’s not a search engine issue, it’s an issue with a single combination of browser and search engine.
To summarize the results of my experiments, when you search for “seeing the forest”, it comes up second in the results when using Google Chrome (obviously with Google search engine), when using Firefox with Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and when using Safari with Bing or Yahoo.
The only situation where it doesn’t show up at all is using Safari with Google as the search engine.
Any suggestions for how to deal with this one?
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Apologies, I was wrong. I didn’t notice when using Firefox and Chrome neither was using Google search. When I did use Google search on those browsers, they still can’t find seeingtheforest.org
So it does seem to be a problem with Google. But it clearly is not a problem with the site.
But it does seem as if something is blocking this from Google. What other explanation is there when the 2nd and 3rd most used search engines easily find a site, and the 1st most popular can’t see it at all?
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I’ve gone through the whole Google webmaster help page you suggested, but the problem seems to be that Google simply doesn’t recognize that the site exists at this point, and it’s not clear that it ever will.
Yahoo and Bing both recognize the site, and as I said, list it second when searching for seeing the forest, with or without quotes.
There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do using Google’s webmaster tools if Google doesn’t recognize the site at all.
The only thing that seems to be a possibility, based on my search through the Google webmaster tools, is to create a site map for seeingtheforest.org
Is that possible for a WordPress site?
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Okay, one more piece of information.
Google does recognize that the originally registered WordPress domain:
seeingtheforestmovie.wordpress.com exists.Google does not recognize that the custom domain I registered for the site: seeingtheforest.org exists
Could there be some problem lurking within WordPress that doesn’t connect seeingtheforest.org with seeingtheforestmovie.wordpress.com?
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Hi Alan,
There’s nothing on the WordPress.com end that would make Google see the seeingtheforestmovie.wordpress.com address instead of seeingtheforest.org. It sounds like Google might have indexed that first address right away, and hasn’t yet crawled your site again to update it to the correct address with all of your content.
The only thing that seems to be a possibility, based on my search through the Google webmaster tools, is to create a site map for seeingtheforest.org
WordPress.com automatically generates a sitemap for your site, which you can find here: http://seeingtheforest.org/sitemap.xml
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Some questions, then:
1) Does it seem likely, or even possible, that Google hasn’t crawled the site in the 6 weeks that it’s had the address seeingtheforest.org?
2) I don’t think I can do anything using Webmaster Tools if Google doesn’t even acknowledge that the site exists at seeingtheforest.org. Or am I missing something else I an do?
3) If there’s nothing I can until Google acknowledges that the site exists, do you recommend I just wait and see if it ever does?
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The only thing I have discovered through Webmaster Tools is that the googlebot has crawled the site, fairly regularly since it was launched. Yet when I try to find it searching for site:seeingtheforest.org as Google recommends, it says the site doesn’t exist.
A similar site search on Bing and Yahoo returns all the pages.
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Hi Alan,
Only Google can confirm the details about how they crawl and list sites, but I’ll do my best to answer your questions and suggest some ways you might follow up on it.
1) Does it seem likely, or even possible, that Google hasn’t crawled the site in the 6 weeks that it’s had the address seeingtheforest.org?
Only Google can confirm how often it crawls a particular site. I checked their help pages and found this “Site crawl errors report” page that might offer more insight:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35120
You can click the “Open the crawl errors report” button on that page to see the report for your site. That will tell you if Google tried to crawl your site and ran into any errors with it.
2) I don’t think I can do anything using Webmaster Tools if Google doesn’t even acknowledge that the site exists at seeingtheforest.org. Or am I missing something else I an do?
Since you successfully verified your site with Google, that means Google knows the site exists. However, WordPress.com can’t control what Google does after that point, so if you don’t see any errors or messages about your site in the search console (webmaster tools) I’m not sure what else can be done at this stage.
3) If there’s nothing I can until Google acknowledges that the site exists, do you recommend I just wait and see if it ever does?
Given that you only recently set up the search console (webmaster tools) for your site, you may need to wait a bit longer and monitor the information you see in the Google search console for more information. That comes directly from Google, so it’s the best way to diagnose any issues Google may have with your site.
If you find any errors, feel free to get in touch and we can see if there’s anything we can do on this end to help.
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I suppose all this means that I’ve reached the point where there’s absolutely nothing to do with either WordPress or Google that make the site searchable on Google.
To summarize:
1) The site has been verified using Google Webmaster Tools
2) Google Webmaster Tools crawl statistics indicate that the Googlebots have been scanning the site for about 7 weeks
3) Google’s crawl statistics indicate 0 errors detected in crawling the site
4) Using Google’s recommended method of querying whether or not Google recognizes that the site exists – searching the term site:seeingtheforest.org – Google does not recognize that the site exists
5) Searching the term “seeing the forest” with or without quotes confirms that Google doesn’t see the site
6) On Bing and Yahoo, the site has not been verified
7) On Bing and Yahoo, searching the term site:seeingtheforest.org returns the results of every page on the site
8) On Bing and Yahoo, a search for the term “seeing the forest” with or without quotes returns the site as the second result, lower only seeingtheforest.com, which has evidently been around for several years.
Wouldn’t you regard all these facts taken together as at least a bit odd?
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Alan,
That does seem odd, but at this point there’s nothing more I can do from my end — your site is all set up to be searchable by Google, and Google verified that it can crawl your site without errors. At this point it’s out of WordPress.com’s control and only Google could tell you more about why it isn’t listing your site. I’m sorry I can’t do more to help at this point.
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