The Invisible Blog

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  familyonthemove · Member · Sep 7, 2009 at 10:40 am

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  I’ve moved my Blog from Yahoo 360 after the demise of the Yahoo site … but now it seems to be totally invisible with no hits at all. I know it may not be the most exciting Blog in the world – but with no real effort on my part my Yahoo Blog had over 3000 hits and a mirror version on a travel blog site had over 6000 hits. Looking at some other blogs the hit rate also seems to be very low and comments almost non-existent. Does WordPress have some ‘stealth’ facility that makes it invisible to Google?

  I’ve looked at the tips on the help site, but don’t fancy emailing all my friends – they already read the travel site version.

  Any tips on how to drive traffic?

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

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  thehline · Member · Sep 7, 2009 at 11:09 am

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  Please make sure that you’ve made your blog searchable under Settings > Privacy in your dashboard.

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  raptortech97 · Member · Sep 7, 2009 at 6:30 pm

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  it may be that Yahoo counted robot visits, and/or your own. WordPress counts neither.

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  familyonthemove · Member · Sep 8, 2009 at 4:18 am

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  Thanks theline – I’ll check the settings.

  And thanks raptortech – that’s a good point …. but even allowing for the search engine visits, it seems a less lively place than Blogger or Yahoo? I’ve seen several similar posts to mine. Perhaps WordPress is still growing?

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  justjennifer · Member · Sep 8, 2009 at 4:28 am

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  Since you haven’t provided a link to your WordPress.COM blog, it’s a bit hard to tell.

  Make sure your are tagging your Posts with a few appropriate categories/tags to take advantage of the global tag and categories pages, which rank high in search engine results. http://support.wordpress.com/posts/categories-vs-tags/

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  thesacredpath · Member · Sep 8, 2009 at 4:56 am

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  @family, is this the blog you are talking about, http://familyonthemove.wordpress.com/ ?

  If you go here, you will see that your blog is not yet indexed by Google but it has been found by Bing. It will take a little while for the search engines to pick you up and get you placed in searches, but each time you publish a post, wordpress automatically pings all the major search engines and services.

  You can give google a prod by verifying your blog with them as explained in this support document: http://support.wordpress.com/verifying-with-google-webmaster-tools/ .

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  familyonthemove · Member · Sep 9, 2009 at 4:07 am

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  Thanks very much for the tips!

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  familyonthemove · Member · Sep 19, 2009 at 10:42 am

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  OK … I’ve followed all the tips above and made sure the blog is indexed properly on google etc ….. but I still get no incoming links and very few hits in total. Of course it could be that my blog is just not interesdting – so I set up sites on Blogger, Yahoo and Flickr and found that I immediately had more hits via search engines even though there was very limited content. Could it be that the ownership of the other blog/photo sites by Google and Yahoo gives them an inherent advantage over WordPress?

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  pornstarbabylon · Member · Sep 19, 2009 at 11:06 am

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  But WordPress has the global tag page unlike Yahoo and Blogger. If you use good categories, then people visiting the global tag page will also see your blog. No more than 12 or else you risk getting kicked off the global tags thinking it’s a spam.