Search Engines

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  audipayne · Member · Feb 1, 2016 at 6:13 pm

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  Hi, there. My blog should be accessible via search engines (it is set up to be publicly searchable), but it does not show up during searches. I have tried several combinations of words to search for it and it does not show up anywhere. Can anyone help?

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

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  timethief · Member · Feb 1, 2016 at 6:20 pm

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  Hi there,

  re: search engine discoverability

  It can take weeks for search engines to index your site content. Please read this support doc https://en.support.wordpress.com/search-engines/ so you know we have no control over search engines positioning or appearance in the SERPs (search engine page results).

  To verify blog ownership of a WordPress.com hosted blog with the major search engines you must use this process > http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
  Note: Even if you do not verify the blog the content will be indexed by search engines so don’t feel panicky about this please.

  WordPress.com automatically supplies sitemaps for our blogs to search engines – we do nothing. http://en.support.wordpress.com/sitemaps/#xml-sitemaps-for-search-engines

  To gain search engine attention, I recommend that you start publishing posts (not pages) https://en.support.wordpress.com/post-vs-page/ frequently. That’s because it can take weeks for search engines to index content in a new blog and/or to re-index content under a new URL.

  For more information on expediting search engine indexing of your site read > http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/omg-i-cant-find-my-blog-on-google

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  timethief · Member · Feb 1, 2016 at 6:22 pm

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  You made the site private originally and it will now take time for the search engines to notice the robots.txt has been removed and the blog is not public.

  I never ever make new blogs private so I do not experience the delay and there is no robots.txt results in the SERPs (search engine page results).

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  timethief · Member · Feb 1, 2016 at 6:23 pm

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  Yikes! I see a wrong word above.
  not public was meant to be now public

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  audipayne · Member · Feb 1, 2016 at 6:27 pm

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  Thanks for the feedback. I actually never made it private – WordPress did so in error and I just received an email from them saying so, so I wanted to make sure they had actually fixed the error as it still is not showing up when I search for it.

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  timethief · Member · Feb 1, 2016 at 6:34 pm

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  It is in the SERPs but as I said above it will rake time and lots of publishing before the indexing happens. If you want to you can Ask Google to re-crawl your URLs. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?hl=en

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  audipayne · Member · Feb 1, 2016 at 6:36 pm

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  I will do that. Thank you so much!

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  timethief · Member · Feb 1, 2016 at 6:38 pm

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  You are welcome and best wishes. :)