Vladimir MartonThere is a lot of people out there – probably including you as well – that are having problems with their WordPress site visibility in Google results. I have had the same problem and spent 4 days trying to make it work. There are a few things and facts that I found helpful while making this codeblog appear online and I’m going to share them with you.
Read first
This article is not for people who started their blog today, wrote one post and can’t find it on Google. It is also not for people who installed a SEO plugin and uploaded their sitemap into Google Search Console. I am writing this in order to help those of you who think they have tried everything, but still no search results. If you aren’t one of us, please visit these pages and read about SEO optimization:
15 Tips to Get Your WordPress Website Indexed by Google
Don’t we all want to be on Google’s first page? Maybe even the first place? There probably isn’t a website owner out there who doesn’t dream of it. After all, you invested a lot of time and energy to create the best possible website. Why wouldn’t you want your effort to be rewarded?
Let’s analyze
So I guess that by now you have your SEO plugin installed, sitemap.xml generated, your page is on both Google Analytics and Google Search console and you’re using the right post formats, lengths, keywords, tags, etc. Let’s take a look at 4 things that the tutorials did not prepare you for:
- Backlinks – Not always as good as you might think. I’m sure that you already know what backlinks are and how good they are for your webpage. Let me tell you, that it is not always true. If your backlinks come from “good” sources and sites, it is very helpful as it helps you get noticed by Google. Now how to get as many backlinks as soon as possible, in as short time as possible? If you just said “I’m going to google ‘get free backlinks’ and see what shows up” to yourself, then stop right there. There is a difference between bad and good backlinks. Google knows what site is helpful, what site spreads spam and what site is dangerous for users. A huge number of webpages that these free backlinks are on is marked as either spam, or dangerous. Don’t you think it would be better to have backlinks on page like www.theverge.com, rather than pages like tools.111web.gqanalytics.to? If you decide to use free backlinks generators, please mind that it could result in worse search results than before.
- Make sure your pages do not have noindex or nofollow in their meta tags. The SEO plugins usually take care of a lot of things, but mostly they optimize your page by inserting tags in HTML, such as meta,keywords, and so one. If you think that your WordPress as well as SEO plugin are configured just fine, go to your homepage using Chrome and press F12. Open Elements tab, expand the <head> tag and look for <meta robots=” … “>. If there is no such thing – you’re fine. If there is a meta tag with empty robots parameter, you’re fine. Although if your meta tag includes words like this: <meta robots=”noindex, nofollow” />, then you’re screwed. You just found your reason why your pages and posts do not appear on Google. Check your SEO settings one more time. If this does not help, try to install some other SEO plugin.
- Your sitemap is submitted, but pages are not indexed in Google Search Console? There is no such thing as ‘force Google to index your site’. The only advice I can give you here is to be patient. It takes some time for google robots to crawl your page. For me it took about 72 hours, and even after that, I only had about 25% of pages indexed. Another thing is that the console often takes last available information and shows THAT on screen. What I’m saying here is that your posts can already be indexed without you knowing it.
- Instead of article name, search for site:mypage.com. If you read the third point, this might be helpful. Usually, when you want to find your post on Google, you just copy the exact name of your post, maybe combined with the name of your website. However, please notice that you just inserted a lot of keywords and there is a ton of sites that have been on market since year 485 BC and have better index position than you. If you’d like to check if your posts/pages are indexed already, please start by googling ‘site:mypage.com’. Google will show you what parts of your site it has indexed.
There is always more tips on this matter and you can try and investigate yourself. Make sure to read the pages above – maybe you missed something fundamental.
Conclusion
To be absolutely honest with you, my problem was that I did not give the google robots enough time. I switched the SEO plugins once in 36 hours, I was changing my sitemaps in the same tempo. I’m pretty sure that this was the reason why I had to wait that long to get indexed. I hope this article helped you and even if not, at least you eliminated another few of possible causes of this problem!
Some helpful links
I’m adding some useful links here which could give you even better idea how to improve your SEO. Contents of these could be the same at some points, but it will definitely help you to get better at optimization.
https://neilpatel.com/blog/improve-google-rankings-without-getting-penalized/
https://www.godaddy.com/garage/smallbusiness/market/10-ways-to-improve-google-keyword-ranking/
https://techtage.com/31-ways-to-better-wordpress-seo/
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-seo/
https://fortunelords.com/wordpress-seo/
I want to suggest another useful link WordPress SEO – The Definitive Guide 2018 – https://fortunelords.com/wordpress-seo/
Added, thanks for suggestion 🙂