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I Screwed Up Privacy Settings Now Google Won't Index Me

by TiffanyLambert
13 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Am I being punished? LOL

I launched a WP blog via Fantastico on a domain thru Hostgator and didn't know it defaulted to do NOT allow search engines to access the site, etc.

The whole time Googlebots were coming. They're still coming every DAY yet I'm not listed in Google.

Why would they visit daily with fresh content posted daily and not index me? Was the initial setting enough to make them put that in their system permanently?

I've never ever had a blog take over 48 hours to get indexed once I tweet it and post it to another blog.

It was March 1st when I fixed the privacy settings FYI

What can I do?

Thanks ahead of time
Tiff
#google #index #privacy #screwed #settings
  • Profile picture of the author Daniel Brock
    Yeah, I have no clue why fantastico does that by default.

    Who doesn't want their blog indexed?

    I suspect that once you change the option it might take a couple days for the SEs to 'realize' it.
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  • Profile picture of the author cashcow
    Don't worry, you're not punished permanently. It does take a few days for them to correct their first impression of you. Hang tight and you will get indexed the right way.

    Lee

    P.S. I think Fantastico just stopped doing this - the last couple of blogs that I installed didn't default to blocking search engines.
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    Gone Fishing
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  • Profile picture of the author Leslie B
    do you have a sitemap created for you blog and send to the search engines? It might help. I use the simple google sitemap plugin.

    Leslie
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    Taking it one day at a time!
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    • Profile picture of the author Eric Lorence
      I can't imagine the number of new folks out there building blogs and all the while have no idea about this setting.

      It seems like a hosting "gotcha" but it makes sense - since many people want to build up their site a little B4 it's ready for indexing.
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  • Profile picture of the author CodyTemke
    damn, odd gotta keep a close eye on default settings that is for sure...
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    • Profile picture of the author Elle Holder
      Tiffany, do you use Webmaster Tools?

      If so, go to Diagnostics >Crawl Stats. If stats are showing, you'll know that they have at least crawled your site. If so, you should show up in the index soon.
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  • Profile picture of the author EA
    TiffanyDow this has happened to me also it took about 7 days and then it was listed. Install the sitemap plugin.. and if you want your site listed sooner than 7 days you can make a new blog post.. If you change your settings then you will be listed don't worry. Good luck Tiffany.
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    Be Kind
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  • Profile picture of the author monitorit
    had the misfortune myself however once you change the settings you should have no problems!
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  • Profile picture of the author Asher
    Hi Tiffany,

    I made a video sometime back but you may have
    already fixed the settings:

    Gotta give some time for the spiders to get back
    to their nest to tell them your site's public instead
    of private.

    Shouldn't be too long. If it IS taking too long,
    however, you can send an email to the Google
    peeps as a webmaster and they'll check it.

    Just don't expect to get a response from them
    though. Your site should get back into index
    pretty soon.

    ... unless your site has some stuff they don't
    like. But knowing you, doubt that'll be it =)

    Asher
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    Asher Aw
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  • Profile picture of the author TiffanyLambert
    Okay I did the sitemap. Google has crawled it daily (I've been checking) so now hopefully it'll just be a matter of days or less. LOL

    Thanks for the info y'all!
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  • Profile picture of the author Darren Hodgson
    I did exactly the same thing. I tried every type of indexing trick I knew and still nothing. When I finally realised what was happening I was fuming.

    I went through all of my indexing stuff again and had no problem getting indexed.

    You'd think I'd learn from the experience ,right? Wrong. Two blogs later I did the same thing again only this time it didn't take as long to find out what was wrong.

    So I went through my indexing stuff again and got indexed no problem.

    I did take about 72 hours on each attempt.
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  • Profile picture of the author TiffanyLambert
    Quick update - and thanks to all y'all who helped

    I woke up this morning and Google indexed me - YEA!

    It took until today (March 7th) and I changed the settings on March 1st.

    I had been uploading about 6 articles at once every 3-4 days but this time, I scheduled 1 blog post per day, so Google kept seeing daily content.

    Ahhh...such a relief!
    Tiff
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  • Profile picture of the author dhex
    I think mine is the worst by far, I did it on 10 micro niche websites. All static. I thought I was doing it right. When I first created my websites I left a robots.txt file to keep Googlebot from crawling my empty directory and index the default files.

    After launching my sites, I deleted the robots.txt file but I made another mistake. I included a noindex, nofollow Meta tag to restrict some of my common pages from being indexed. I thought I used it only on privacy policy, contact us pages etc. But I made a mistake there also. I did it on all of my pages. Now I'm having a hard time to get the pages indexed. Some of my pages are indexed and also have enough back links that can get them into first page but they are still sitting in 100 regions in Google SERP because of what I did.
    There never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over
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