Site does not show up in search engines.
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I have a very simple free site in memory of my parents. It has been on-line for a month, but Bing and Google search engines still can’t find it. I have no experience with websites and don’t need much in the way of features, just want a search on my parent’s names to like to this tribute.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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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
Search engines aren’t attracted to sites that are page based. Sites that are post based where publication of posts, not pages is frequent are more attractive to them. 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.
WordPress.COM SEO resources that you will want to consult are:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/search-engines/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/ -
Hi there,
The website is indexed in Google – https://cloudup.com/cIt7chy_1Wx
The issue is that the site is unlikely to rank well for any search queries because it contains almost no text or information – as far as search engines can see.
Google can’t “see” text in the Google Docs iframe, so the site is essentially blank.
Here’s the text Google sees (from Google Cache) – https://goo.gl/m8fV1K
I’d recommend copy and pasting the text and images from the Google document into pages or posts on the site. That way, Google can see it and it’ll rank better for search queries.
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Thanks for your insight and advice – I’m a 70 yr old “newbie” and have a lot to learn, as this is my first foray into websites. I’ll work on your suggestions and see how it goes. Since I want this site to outlive me, I’m limited to the free version and can’t use the plug-ins that would undoubtedly make life easier. The Google Docs iframe was the quick&dirty (did I mention cheap?) work-around, but now I see its limitations. Sure appreciate your time and advice!
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Hi Gary68,
I’ve worked on my site and created pages instead of just the Google Docs. If it’s not too much trouble, could you do your Google Cache “thing” and tell me if my site is now more visible to search engines? Thanks!
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Google should be able to see the text because it’s now in the site’s html rather than in an iframe.
It can take Google several weeks before it recrawls the site and updates its info.
That process can be sped up by using the use the “fetch as Googlebot and index” feature in Google Search Console:
https://kb.yoast.com/kb/fetch-as-googlebot/
I hope this helps :)
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