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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Thanks Dan,
Yes – the blog is in a sub-directory of the main url.
Can you tell me how I could change the pointer from the main URL to send inquiries to my blog instead?
Regards, Patrick
@ Patrick:
It all depends on if you want your blog to appear as a separate web site or not. For any given domain, the hosting provider maintains the DNS records that send inquiries to your site. You can usually specify the destination of a domain (folder in your hosting space) where domain requests are sent.
If your blog is to remain in a sub-folder under your domain, you may have to wait.
If you can make the blog live at a domain name of its own, that may be better.
Either way, you should submit the blog URL to search engines, keep it active by posting, and try to post links to the actual blog URL in your web travels…
Hope this helps,
Dan
My wordpress site is http://www.zebraremovals.wordpress.com and never shows up on google. I’m trying to link http://www.davehollington.co.uk to it.
Anyone know why my blog never gets indexed. I’ve checked the dashboard settings and it’s set to public, allow websites to crawl etc etc. Ta
@ zebra removals:
A quick search for “zebra removals” turns up several zebraremovals.co.uk links. It seems that you are perhaps affiliated.
WordPress.com blogs are notorious for slow indexing. What keyword or keyword phrase are you targeting? Have you changed your header keywords tag to include this, and included it early in the blog’s content?
It may be worth fixing the numerous HTML validation errors showing up for zebraremovals.wordpress.com. See the errors here.
Try cleaning up the code, configure and employ limited, relevant keywords, and try to link to your blog from a variety of other sites.
There is a page created with Dreamweaver at zebraremovals.co.uk/blog.html. It is not a blog, however, just a page called blog.html…
You could install a copy of WordPress on this domain in a sub-folder named blog. Once set up, you could post an announcement on the WordPress.com blog with the zebraremovals.co.uk/blog/ address… and enjoy full control of your blog’s settings. There are some pretty good SEO plugins available that can help with indexing content.
Hope this helps,
Dan
Hi Dan
Thanks for the info, my wordpress.com blog is now appearing on Google!!
I didn’t know I could put wordpress on my site, I got someone to make the site for me because I know nothing, I’m going to command him to install wordpress as you say.
I’m not an affiliate, it’s my own business but I do post lots of ads for cheshire house removals so maybe those are showing up.
I know nothing much about websites, I just drive a van and, like everyone else I suppose, I’m trying to get my website to show up well for the right keywords on Google.
Thanks again
I have a new site that I have been trying to get indexed for the past 2 weeks. I have tried almost everything and nothing is working. Usually my new sites are indexed within hours so this is very frustrating.
@ online freesite:
I’m not sure if this is the case, but something that comes to mind is that if you purchase a pre-existing domain name, you are purchasing the history of this domain name as well, good or bad.
If any owner(s) abused basic SEO guidelines, such as keyword padding, allowing spam comments, linking to questionable sites, etc., it could take a little while to rectify. Again, I don’t know if this is relevant in your case(s).
I would suggest fixing any HTML code errors that show up using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Modern web browsers are pretty good at “fixing” broken code for display, but the Google (and other search engine) spider programs are very literal and could stop processing a page when they come to any simple formatting or code issues.
Google offers a manual web site submission form that has a comment field at Add your URL to Google.
If you haven’t used this tool already, I you might try it…
Hope this helps,
Dan
Hi Dan, I know this is an old thread but I’m really hoping you can help me out. I’m not sure what is going on with my blog. http://www.stacyvencill.com/blog . It’s been up for a few weeks, I’ve added a sitemap via Google, but still having issues. Any you help you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Hi Rick,
You site does appear to be indexed in Google, just not very well.
I checked your site with the W3C Markup Validation Service, and there were several errors found. Here is a link to the validator results. There are some things such as DOCTYPE that you’ll want to fix.
Using the Google “link: ” backlink checker revealed an indexed yet broken link to the blog’s home page:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ';' in /home/content/w/e/b ...
http://www.stacyvencill.com/blog/ - Cached
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ';' in /home/content/w/e/b/webmastersav/html/blog/index.php on line 6.
It appears that this error no longer exists.
You also have a reference to a missing XML Namespace facebook.com identifier in your html opening tag:
<html dir="ltr" lang="en-US" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml" xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#" >
I would recommend trying to re-submit your site to Google manually, and for a reason tell them that it was previously broken. I would also sign up for and add your site to a Google Webmaster Tools account. This will give you great insight into what Google actually sees when trying to index your site, along with any errors encountered.
It is a good idea to get some other sites to link to yours as it will help your link popularity.
You might also consider that the drugs mentioned on this site are likely included in the keyword list of online pharmaceutical spammers.
Hopefully you find this useful,
Dan
Hi Dan,
Thank you so much for taking the time to look at my blog. I will look into the errors that you pointed out.
Thanks again!
Rick
My pleasure, Rick. Hope you find some good information to help with this…
Hi Dan,
My recently new wordpress site is not indexing correctly. Im not sure if this is because I have recently changed the permalink format and Google needs time to recrawl it (I have submitted both the main site page and blog URLS), or if it is related to my SEO ultimate setup or errors in the site.
Submitting the site to the validator gave 25 errors. This surprised me as I purchased the theme. However, a lot of these look fairly harmless..
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deviouscreations.co.uk&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
I have also set up my robot.txt file using SEO Ultimate’s File Editor override as:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content
Disallow: /t/
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /
However, my new posts never show up. Instead, the same posts that are crossposted to my live journal show up instead! So you get the cross posts, not the originals.
What have I done wrong??
Hi Dan,
It honestly does not appear that you have done anything terribly wrong here, but I would fix as many of the validation errors as possible. I am assuming you meant robots.txt not robot.txt as the latter is not correct.
You mention “crossposted” content. I’m not sure what you are trying to accomplish or mean by this, but Google will definitely penalize you for duplicate content. I don’t know how weighted this would be across sites like in your case.
If you block search engines from indexing your wp-content folder, your image uploads will be omitted. I can see where this might penalize you if a spider goes looking for something and then stops because of this. You might try opening up all restrictions in robots.txt or temporarily renaming it to see if therein lies the problem…
Did you create/upload a Google site map (XML format)? In case you weren’t aware, there is a great plugin for WordPress that does just this – automatically. It’s called Google XML Sitemaps and the link is here.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that changing and updating your permalinks causes Google to lose its index of you. It may just take some plain old-fashioned time.
Judging by your site’s html source code, you have a Google Webmaster Tools validation META tag in there. I would look closely at the Google Webmaster Tools info…
Also, it would be great to know what you find out on this and post it to share with others…
-Dan