I have a WordPress site that generates a single page site for users from some fields they enter into a form and some images they upload. I want to get Google to come out and index the page but my users will not be technical enough to set their page up with Webmaster Tools. What can I do from WordPress when I build the page to tell Google a new page is up and to please come out and index it when they have a chance?
Well you don't have to do anything actually, you could just sit back and wait for it to happen naturally. However there are things you could do to speed up the indexing process.
Here's a suggested way that does not involve having your users do anything:
Create one or more (quality) links pointing to their single page site from other websites that you know are already indexed in Google (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q for more information). Ideally on blogs that get updated frequently because then then it is likely google crawls them more frequently.
Use a site:domain.com search in Google to see whether google has already found your new pages.
Here is how google crawling and indexing works:
Crawling:
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and
updated pages to be added to the Google index.
We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages
on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot
(also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic
process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often,
and how many pages to fetch from each site.
Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated
from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data
provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it
detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to
crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted
and used to update the Google index.
Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we
keep the search side of our business separate from our
revenue-generating AdWords service.
Indexing:
Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to
compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on
each page. In addition, we process information included in key content
tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot
can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot
process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages
Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897?hl=en
Related
how can I achieve a certain well structured layout in the Google search results as presented below? I am working with multiple Wordpress instances on several sub domains (not a multisite). Google does not get along with the sitemap structure so all sites are scattered around. Any ideas?
In the search results it should look like this (basically like any other well structured sitemap):
MAINPAGE.COM
(Meta text)
---- SUB.MAINPAGE.COM
---- SUB.MAINPAGE.COM
---- SUB.MAINPAGE.COM
I messed around with Toast but I did not reach any results.
Messed around with Yoast? You just need to install Yoast on all instances. Submit the sitemaps generated by Yoast from all sites to Search Console.
Positioning the results in Google SERPs is not driven by sitemap. It
is driven by Google's algorithmic analysis and rankings. For one
search query, it is possible that Google finds a page from Instance B
better than instance C page or other site etc.
Under Google Search Console > Indexing > check the issues you're having with indexing. Do this for each instance property OR if you've only one property for ALL sub-domains, just check the Indexing/Coverage issues.
Additional Notes:
Wordpress 5+ comes with built-in sitemap functionality. If you're having issues with Yoast sitemap generation, try that as a fallback. Yoast sitemaps are better than built-in ones. Anyway. Submit them for each WordPress instances to Search Console to let Google discover pages from your submitted sitemaps.
Plus. If you want Google to analyze pages from all of your sub-domains, verify Search Console via DNS property. It acknowledges Google to explore through all main site and its sub-domains under the same property including https & http versions.
As the title says. I have an ASP.NET web application that I published to my azure account. I did a little SEO and it should show up somewhere on the search engines but it doesn't.
It doesn't even show up if I type in the address in the search field. It works fine when typing the URL in address field.
My azure subscription is "Pay-as-you-go".
Any tips or answers are appriciated!
Thanks!
My answer mainly pertains to Google. How long have you waited? It's my experience that it takes a few days to a week minimum to start showing up (if you're using Google sign up for their web master tools and when you submit your site you can see when it's indexed and what pages are indexed which is important because they may skip content they deem is duplicated elsewhere whether it is or not). It's also my experience (using Azure) that sub domains on "azurewebsites.net" end up with poor SEO but if I have a full domain on my site it ranks much higher.
I also assumed that you submitted the site to the search engines, if you haven't site up for a web master account and do that (Bing and Google both have these).
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
In Google you can also search specifically for your site to see what comes back which will indicate that others can get to your stuff (even if it's buried 100 pages deep in other searches):
site:[your site].azurewebsites.net
In our website built on WordPress, we changed name of one of our Custom Post type from 'A' to 'B' and also changed hierarchy of few categories.
Now, the problem is that google is indexing/crawling the old 'A' CPT Name and also old catgeory structure, which is leading to either random pages (because WordPress makes guess and shows page with those keywords in URL) or 404 errors.
What can we do (via Webmaster Tools) to make google re-index our whole site and start honoring our new structure? Thanks.
Here is the brief explanation of the Google's indexing policy:
The process
The crawl process begins with a list of web addresses from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners. As Google crawlers visit these websites, they look for links for other pages to visit. The software pays special attention to new sites, changes to existing sites and dead links.
Computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often and how many pages to fetch from each site. Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently for your web search results. They care more about having the best possible results because in the long run that's what's best for users and, therefore, their business.
Choice for website owners
Most websites don't need to set up restrictions for crawling, indexing or serving, so their pages are eligible to appear in search results without having to do any extra work.
That said, site owners have many choices about how Google crawls and indexes their sites through Webmaster Tools and a file called “robots.txt”. With the robots.txt file, site owners can choose not to be crawled by Google bot or they can provide more specific instructions about how to process pages on their sites.
Site owners have granular choices and can choose how content is indexed on a page-by-page basis. For example, they can opt to have their pages appear without a snippet (the summary of the page shown below the title in search results) or a cached version (an alternate version stored on Google's servers in case the live page is unavailable). Web-masters can also choose to integrate search into their own pages with Custom Search.
Read more here and here.
We currently use google accounts for our site ibiblio.org. Setting up the tracking on our landing pages is no big deal. But, we have tons of "collections" on our server, which as a public service, we allow a ton of users to host their own website installs (usually wordpress or wikis). Here is an example of a collection
These installs exist on a server, each install is a subfolder. Is there a way we can track the activity of these subfolders (or installs) without having to inject tracking code into each of their HTML files? We have a lot of contributors, so injecting code could get messy.
Thanks so much for your time and help.
There are ways, depending on the server's programming language, to create google analytics requests every page load (i.e. whenever page requests are fired). Tracking an entire site is not possible if the HTML files are served statically, because GA wouldn't know a page load happened.
I have a site who's search ranking has plumetted. It should be quite SEO friendly because its built using XHtml/CSS and has been run against the SEO toolkit.
The only thing I can think that may be annoying Google is
The keywords are the same accross the whole site rather than being page specific. (cant see why this would be a massive deal
Another URL has been set up that simply points to my site (without redirecting) (again - no big deal)
Non UK users are automatically forwaded onto the US version of the site which is a different brand. I guess this could be the problem. If google spiders my site from the US then it will never get the UK version
So the question is, does geo redirecting setting effect my SEO? Is it possible to detect if who is accessing your site is actually a search engine that is spidering my site. In this case I don't want to do any geo-location
Do not use same keywords on entire site. Try to use specific keywords per page.
Do not let several URL:s point directly to the same site since this will cause the inlinks from the different domains to be treated as to different domains. If you point URLs by redirect, all inlinks will be added to the target domain and thus increase it's "inlink score".
To detect is request is from a crawler, use the browsercaps project: http://owenbrady.net/browsercaps/