I started 2 new sites at pretty much the same time.  They are both small blogs, running the exact same blogging software (even the same template).  The content is different, of course.  One of them was indexed in Google 3 days after launch.  The other one has not been indexed at all.  It gets visited by Googlebot 1-2 times a week, but it won't show up in search results, even if I do a "site:www.example.com" search.  Is this normal?
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This is a general, community wiki  question and answer pair intended to address any questions   concerning the reasons a site or specific site contents do not appear   in search engine results.      If your question was closed as a duplicate of this question and you   feel that the information provided here does not provide a sufficient   answer, please open a discussion on .   My site (or specific pages on my site) is not appearing in search engine results.  Why isn't my content indexed and what can I do about it?
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On my site, I currently have no special rules for search engines. It is a blog, statically generated using a Python program. When I search for some of my articles on Google, there is usually a tag or category page included in the results. Sometimes it even ranks ahead of the article itself. Obviously, as these links aren't always going to have the article on them, this aren't the results I want people to click on.  So, I'm thinking of setting noindex on these pages. Is there any possible downside to doing so? Is this possible to do via robots.txt, or do I have to add it to all the relevant templates? All I can find for robots.txt are ways to stop the search engine crawling those pages, which isn't what I want - while I don't want them indexed, it's still the only surefire way to find all my blog posts.
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I've recently found some websites which provide a specific number of visits by paying. I'm curious if this is a (very) bad practice for search engines (like Google).
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We are currently developing a site that currently has 8 million unique pages that will grow to about 20 million right away, and eventually to about 50 million or more.  Before you criticize... Yes, it provides unique, useful content. We continually process raw data from public records and by doing some data scrubbing, entity rollups, and relationship mapping, we've been able to generate quality content, developing a site that's quite useful and also unique, in part due to the breadth of the data.  It's PR is 0 (new domain, no links), and we're getting spidered at a rate of about 500 pages per day, putting us at about 30,000 pages indexed thus far. At this rate, it would take over 400 years to index all of our data.  I have two questions:   Is the rate of the indexing directly correlated to PR, and by that I mean is it correlated enough that by purchasing an old domain with good PR will get us to a workable indexing rate (in the neighborhood of 100,000 pages per day). Are there any SEO consultants who specialize in aiding the indexing process itself. We're otherwise doing very well with SEO, on-page especially, besides, the competition for our "long-tail" keyword phrases is pretty low, so our success hinges mostly on the number of pages indexed.   Our main competitor has achieved approx 20MM pages indexed in just over one year's time, along with an Alexa 2000-ish ranking.  Noteworthy qualities we have in place:   page download speed is pretty good (250-500 ms) no errors (no 404 or 500 errors when getting spidered) we use Google webmaster tools and login daily friendly URLs in place I'm afraid to submit sitemaps. Some SEO community postings suggest a new site with millions of pages and no PR is suspicious. There is a , too, in order to avoid increased scrutiny (at approx 2:30 in the video).      Clickable site links deliver all pages, no more than four pages deep and typically no more than 250(-ish) internal links on a page. Anchor text for internal links is logical and adds relevance hierarchically to the data on the detail pages. We had previously set the crawl rate to the highest on webmaster tools (only about a page every two seconds, max). I recently turned it back to "let Google decide" which is what is advised.
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I recently registered a new domain, pointed it to my existing server, and set up a minimal page just saying "test" and nothing else.  I just discovered tonight that the page is already indexed in Google! There are no links to the site (I haven't even told anyone about the domain since I haven't done anything with it yet).  Is Google trawling WHOIS records or something?
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Suppose I have been using a domain, say www.bollywoodhatke.com for 3 years, and it has a good Alexa (hypothetical situation). It has backlinks and its has 7,000 pages indexed and 50,000 images indexed, but later there is a reason I am forced to change the domain name where the website is served.  In that case →  Would it be possible to tell Google that we are the same people with the same website, but the domain name changed?  I mean, can I somehow transfer the content to the new domain so that all the pages are indexed immediately, backlink juice is also transferred to the new domain, and all the pages indexed correctly?  I think moz.com  was semoz.com previously. They must have certainly done something.
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As that title says, my website is being indexed by Google twice.  Both indexes have the right SEO information for the home page, such as title and description. However for the sublinks there are two versions, one version of the indexed site that has the correct sublinks and sublink information, and the other version that has all sublinks pointing to the home page with the format of these wrong sublinks being http://example.com/#random%20text  I have gone into webmasters and chosen my prefered domain, I have tried removing these wrong sublink pages, but due to redirecting to home, it stops home from being indexed, so I reverted this change, I have tried demoting the sublinks, it did not work, I've tried adding &lt;meta name="fragment" content="!"&gt; to my header, it did not work, I have tried disabling all plugins on WordPress to see if that was the reason, it was not.  I've everything I can think of and would really appreciate some help as to how I can stop Google indexing one version of my website with all the wrong sublinks.  If it's of any help, when I search for the business website name on Google as "businessexample" it shows the broken link index version, and when I search as "business example" it shows the correct version.  Update : Still not able to figure this out, any help is welcome.
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I have  a post I created yesterday that was indexed rather quickly by Google. However, I have two other post that I created within the past 4 days that are  not indexed and I cannot find a trace of them within the SERPs.  Any idea what my cause this to happen?
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When I check Alexa rankings for my site it says that one site is linking to my site.   Is it only showing back links? If it is then why are other website traffic checking tools like Google showing different different back links?
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I've been using the following line in the &lt;head&gt; of my sites for years:  &lt;meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days" /&gt;  I recently discovered that it's not one of  that Google understands, which I take to mean that there's no point in including it, and that it's been doing no good at all for years.  How often do search engines crawl a website by default, and what reliable ways are there to increase or decrease that frequency?
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I have a new website with 140k pages, according to my sitemaps.  After submission of my sitemap index to Google, the Googlebot has started crawling the site a couple of hours ago, and at a steady pace, but it's doing so too slowly: roughly one request per minute.  At such rate, it'll take 100 days for the site to be indexed!  Is there a way to increase the rate?  Why does all Google documentation suggest that they don't recommend changing the crawl rate, and that changing the crawl rate will only make the crawling slower?
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I'm working with a client who manages real-estate agents. All of these agents have their own individual sites, and they all want the same layout and functionality. So, I have a "master" site designed which is dynamically changed to fit the agent/area/whatever through a MySQL database. We have relatively static content in the DB about the agent and the area, then the rest is very dynamic content from a listing service, which is updated daily.  My question is how to set this up so that we can keep on using all the different domains and identical programming (i.e. all the files are identical, except pictures) and have decent SEO as well.  They had some trouble in the past with Google blacklisting their sites because they were considered "mirrored sites". Which...they pretty much are, but the difference between mirrored sites is that we're searching very different areas of the listings DB.  Ideally, all the listings are relatively unique to each site, but sometimes there aren't any listings for the area, or the listings for two sites overlap...that's when they get busted for the mirrorring.  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to both have decent SEO for the individual sites, and keep it easy to manage? There are currently over 100 sites (20 agents, about 5 sites each--one agent site, and a few "area" sites), so not mirroring things is just a ton of work.
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For example, I  after using Google to try to find an answer. I then turned back to Google and did a search for  and it was already the first result! Similar searches also put my question on the first page, usually in the top 5!  This is insanity. Did I get lucky and post just before an indexing? Is the popularity of SO leading to Google indexing extremely frequently? Or is Jeff using some kind of crazy SEO?
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I've had my website hacked. I have cleaned it and searched google site:example.com and made a list of all the results. Removed the actual links that are OK and made a list of the ones in the format of example.com/ad0-b1fermarte54eb17chb-1244425. I've submitted these links to Google to remove and Google removed these links.  The problem here is that after my initial search, that resulted in 200 URLs which we've removed, other new links appeared out of nowhere. These links don't actually work anymore and return a 404 page, but Google still has these in its results.  We've tried deleting our sitemap and re-submitting it. Google has crawled it, but again, it has not removed the dummy search results.  Looking in our google webmaster console, we saw that in the coverage tab the number of indexed links spiked from 230 (normal usage) to 10.900 links - I'm guessing these are all dummy links that were infected and now cleaned.  Any magic way of having Google remove dead links automatically? Or a way to force it to recrawl the entire website?
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One of our websites was copied word for word all 400 pages by someone who used a special program to clone the site. We saw the program in the code.   This was done in early April and soon after that we lost a lot of rank in Google. We just discovered the copied site today. It is mirrorred 100%.   We did change the front page of our site since then to make some differences but since the Penguin update, we still have not recovered. We have also corrected the problems in Webmaster Tools. Will the mirrored site affect our Google rank to a severe degree or are there other issues that are affecting us? What can be done about that mirrored site?
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So I was searching for one of my own websites on Google: http://www.botlibre.com  and to my surprise found some clones of my website, like:  http://83waystowasteyourtime.adidas.com  and:  http:// mediaiq.astral.comm  My question are:   Why are they creating clones of my website?  Some kind of SEO scheme or what? What gain could they be getting? How do they have a URL at adidas.com and astral.comm?  I assume it's not Adidas steeling my content. How do I shutdown these sites and stop people from stealing my content? (on Tomcat)
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Currently look after 3 websites. I changed one of them to be HTTPS as it's ecommerce, however have seen a huge drop in organic traffic since this was implemented. Went from around 800 impressions to 400.   Any ideas as to why?   Very concerning as I expected it to improve if anything!  I set up 301 redirects to carry through to old pages to http://www.example.com/product1 would go to https://www.example.com/product1  I also set up a separate webmaster account for the HTTPs version as our integration wasn't working well with Google Merchant Centre, and data is flowing correctly but unsure why/if this would cause conflict.  Very confused!