It’s disheartening when you spend countless hours building a new blog only to discover that Google has yet to index it. Without your blog showing up in Google’s search results, few (if any) people will find it. Granted, you may receive some traffic via direct type-ins, social media, links, etc., but this tiny trickle of visitors isn’t enough to create a successful blog. So, why isn’t your blog showing up in Google?
WordPress Settings
One of the first things you should check is your blog’s visibility settings. If you are using WordPress, log into your admin panel and select Settings > Reading > and under ” Search Engine Visibility,” make sure the box labeled “Search Engine Visibility Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is left unchecked. Checking this box will essentially tell Google and other search engines not to index your blog. This setting is turned off by default, but it’s not uncommon for inexperienced bloggers and webmasters to accidentally click it when initially setting up their site.
Check Your Robots.txt
Assuming your blog isn’t set to discourage search engine visibility, you should check the robots.txt file. This is somewhat more technical since you’ll need direct access to your web host. Using a file transfer protocol (FTP) program such as FileZilla, access your blog’s root folder and open the robots.txt file. Next, look for any unusual code, particularly code like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The above code disallows ALL search engine bots from crawling the site. If the user agent is set to disallow “googlebot,” other search engines will be able to crawl your blog but not Google.
It’s Still New
Of course, another potential reason why your blog isn’t showing up in Google is because it’s still new. Google normally does a pretty good job at indexing new sites, but if there are no links pointing to your site, Google won’t know about it. Thus, it won’t index it. So, how do you solve this problem? The easiest solution is to promote your site by building backlinks to it. Whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, etc., you should create some initial backlinks for search engine bots to follow.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below!
I just somehow get visitors to my blog but never knew of these methods of getting Google to index it faster.
Very helpful for the people with small knowledge of Search Engine. Thank You
Great post it is. Even my new blog along with the first article got indexed in just 4 hours after domain registration