Has your WordPress blog very little or no traffic? If you don’t do any sharing of your content with other blogs or on social media then that might be why. But what if you’re all over the web shouting about your amazing blog but still getting virtually no visitors?
It could be that Google and other search engines are not indexing your website. Luckily there’s an easy way to see if your website has been indexed by Google.
To find out if your website has been indexed type the code below in Google search:
info:yourwebsite.comObviously replace yourwebsite.com with your domain. If your website has been indexed you should see one search entry for your homepage. If nothing is found then either your site is not being indexed by Google or you may have a Google penalty applied to your website.
WordPress Search Engine Visibility
The first thing to check is to see if you’ve fallen foul to an often overlooked setting – the WordPress Search Engine Visibility option.
In the administrative section of your WordPress website go to Settings > Reading. At the bottom of this page you will find an option called WordPress Search Engine Visibility with a check box for Discourage search engines from indexing this site – make sure this option IS NOT ticked.
If it is ticked then Google and other search engines will not crawl and index your website. It does happen that this option gets turned on. Sometimes when a website is being build this option is ticked to prevent search engines indexing unfinished content. I’ve seen it happen with very detrimental consequences.
There’s a message below this option in WordPress that states that It is up to search engines to honor this request in my experience search engines will actually completely ignore your website as requested.
Turning the option off doesn’t magically put your website into the search results, it often takes weeks or even months for the search engines to return and start indexing. If this option was turned on then I suggest creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to search engines using webmaster tools.
Google Webmaster Tools
To fully diagnose issues with your website not getting indexed by search engines you can setup Google Webmaster Tools and/or webmaster tools provided by Microsoft and Yahoo.
Using Google webmaster tools you can find lots of information that can help fix website problems. The information includes how many of the pages of your website are in the Google index, how often the Google bot visits your page and how long it takes to crawl your website. You can test your robots.txt file and add sitemaps to your website to help Google when indexing.
The post Low traffic? Check your WordPress search engine visibility appeared first on John Conleth.
