Why won’t Google find our website?
QOur model-boat club has had a Wordpress website ( www. edmbc.net) for over two years now. Despite the length of time our site has been online, we still don’t have a hint of a presence on Google. Many other sites refer to and even link to ours, but if you search for our site, even by its full name (Eastleigh and District Model Boat Club), there are no Google hits. Please advise what we have got to do to achieve this, as we are getting many complaints.
Stuart Jowsey
AGoogle isn’t indexing your website because your home page contains code that explicitly tells it not to.
Google receives plenty of criticism for privacy-related misdemeanours, both real and perceived, but the mechanics of its search engine respect special electronic instructions that can be inserted into a website that tell Google not to index a particular web page, or even a whole site. This is typically done by including a special file called ‘robots.txt’ in the website server’s root (top) folder, or by including in the main index page a special bit of code known as a meta tag. A quick look at the source code of your website’s index page shows that the latter is present – and that’s why Google is ignoring your content.
The offending line is: <meta name=”robots” content=”none”>. While the usual instruction for preventing indexing is ‘<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>’, Google interprets the “none” parameter to mean the same thing – so Google simply bypasses your website.
As you’re using Wordpress we’d imagine that this is simply an inherited aspect of your chosen theme, rather than an intentional insertion by you or on your web developer – although it’s possible that someone has misunderstood how Google interprets the “none” parameter.
The solution is to delete this instruction from your website’s index page. Quite how you do that depends on how you update and upload assets to your website host, so we can’t offer precise instructions. You should either request that your website developer remove the offending line or, if you do the job yourself, then open index.html page in a text editor, delete the line (see screenshot above), save the page and then upload it to your server using your FTP software.
Once you’ve done this Google should index your site within a few weeks. If you’re impatient, you can speed up the process by specifically flagging your site for Google’s attention via the company’s Add URL page, at www. snipca.com/16937. Just type the website’s address (URL), fill out the CAPTCHA security form then click Submit Request (see screenshot left).
It might require more work to move your site up the results list. For advice on search-engine optimisation (SEO), read Google’s own guide at www.snipca.com/16938.