WordPress Blog Not Indexed by Google
There are several blogs and web sites discussing issues with WordPress sites not getting indexed by Google. I was hoping that the reason my site was not getting indexed would be revealed in this thread: Major Problem solved with WordPress & Google. Unfortunately, it wasn't.
WordPress Privacy Settings
I searched a lot more and finally realized that there was a WordPress setting that handled this. I had set my site to be publicly available in an older version, but somehow, somewhere along the way, it got changed.
My Settings>Privacy settings were set to "I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors". Once I changed the Privacy settings to "I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technochrati) and archivers", and clicked the "Save Changes" button, my site tools indicated that Google had pretty much instantly started indexing the site. Then a simple Google search of my site revealed several posts and content. I wish I could identify when this setting was changed, because I clearly would have remembered changing it, which I did not.
Mission accomplished, at least! I hope this helps someone else out...
-Dan
(9 votes, average: 4.56 out of 5)
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OMG… I lost all traffic for months… Was searching and searching, playing with codes etc. I never looked at that configuration section!!! Thank you so much!
@ Luke:
You’re welcome. Glad to be of help. I just wish I knew when this setting got changed…
Hey Dan,
I changed to a wordpress template, so I guess it was pre-configured to that. So far (1 day after), my site is still not indexed. I guess Google take some time to do that. You know how long this might take?
What is your web site address? It could take days, weeks or months for Google to index. Have you validated your site to make sure there are no coding errors? Try using the W3C Markup Validation Service. It’s awesome!
There are a ton of good articles out there on search engine optimization. I would Google that phrase… Repeating keywords and using terms that don’t appear in the heading tags of your blog can actually hurt you. It also helps to have links from other sites that point to yours.
If you use WordPress (I assume so), try out the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. When you change your blog, it will resubmit the sitemap to Google for indexing. You can also submit manually with the plugin options.
Note Google only allows one submission per day.
-Dan
Hi Dan,
My website is http://www.panamafutbol.com
Let me try your suggestions and get back to you.
Many thanks for your help!
Luke
Google XML Sitemaps is installed. Hope it wont take too long to get re-indexed
Really too bad, this site was for years number 1 in Google… Still glad to have this figured out.
Thanks again!
Glad to be of help. I would strongly recommend fixing the XHTML Transitional validation issues (41 errors, 18 warnings) using the W3C website I mentioned above…
And just out of curiosity, what search term did you expect to be listed #1 in Google for, Panama Futbol? Your site currently has duplicate keywords and uses the same phrases in different word order, which could be flagged by Google as “keyword padding”. This may hurt your rankings for sure.
-Dan
Well anything related with futbol (soccer) in Panama. Panama futbol, futbol en panama, futbol panameño etc.
How serious are those issues by the way? I have an other site, which shows even more errors, but it has pretty good results in google.
There are varying theories about page validity; I think the bottom line really is web browser compatibility, accessibility, etc..
If a search engine is spidering your site and it encounters errors, it may abort any further spidering, depending on the severity of the issue. They don’t try to figure out what you might have meant to type…
…which is unlike Internet Explorer which I have seen make automatic code corrections during page rendering such as converting forward-slashes to back-slashes… LOL
Hehe, well… I guess I will try to fix some of those. I think most are minor mistakes (spaces etc).
Thanks again Dan. I will report back once I am indexed again in Google
My page is back in Google! Number 1 again after one week.
Thanks again Dan, couldn’t have done this without you.
Cheers,
Luke
Excellent! You’re welcome and I’m glad you made out well!
thanks a TON!!
I’ve been trying to figure this out for 2 weeks. No indexing on google.
Thanks again so much appreciated
Sure it is. I was stuck up with this once ago. I was consulting many experts but couldnt find a solution, Thank God, one blogger helped me to solve this and Hurrah now I am indexed!
@Ryan Yokome and Ashley:
You’re welcome. Thanks for providing feedback. It’s nice to know when the information you post proves to be useful to others!
This same exact thing happened to my blog. I run 6 wordpress blogs and 3 vbulletin forums on a dedicated server. After setting up my most recent blog, google would not index it. Even after submitting a sitemap, and waiting 2 weeks, still no indexing on the articles.
2 days ago I changed that setting, and google is still not indexing the site. I had put my own .htaaccess file and my own robots.txt into the html root. I wonder if wordpress tried to change something on those files, but couldn’t.
I’am going to give it 24 – 48 more hours. If the search engines do not start indexing, I’am going to delete the site and start over.
@ pc gamers:
Is there any chance that the previous domain owner abused it? I did find mention of the sale of your domain name on AdminAddict.net…
@ Dan
I bought the domain name a couple of weeks ago. The name was transferred to my registor with no problems. The DNS servers were changed to point towards the new IP Address and server. I then setup a wordpress blog, verified the site through my google webmaster tools, installed the google analytics code, submitted a sitemap, the sitemap is being downloaded by google with no errors. Google Webmaster Tools shows that the sitemap contains 40 URLs, but only the homepage url is being indexed.
A link to the site was added to my signature on a gaming forum – this should give about 300 – 500 backlinks, submitted to digg, stumbleupon, posted links in various webmaster forums asking for reviews and this morning, the site and its feed was added to my Yahoo Blog Log.
All of the old URLs are from the previous owner had a forum on the site.
I have never had this many problems getting a site indexed.
There are a lot of validation errors on your site. While this isn’t necessarily a show-stopper, there is one that I found particularly interesting: an RSS feed from elgms.com. In your page source code, it is coded as
*.elgms.com/forum/external.php?&type=js
which seems interesting to me within a script tag and without a language definition. Just an observation. I’m wondering if Google may somehow see such things as misleading…
Hello Dan,
Thank you very much for writing this. I was frustrated due to a not indexed wordpress blog. Now it is indexed. Many thanks