WP, hostgator and subdomains

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I just posted a new wp site and something is messed up. The site looks fine, everything is there as it should be. The problem is google hasn't sniffed it and I have the SEO plugin installed. Last wp site I posted got mobbed within 30 minutes by search engines.

It's in an add-on domain, but this is the first time I've created and employed a subdomain system. Since that's the only thing I've done differently, anyone with hostgator subdomain experience that has some insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
#website design #hostgator #subdomains
  • Just installing a WP SEO plugin does not guarantee the site will be indexed. It seems odd that a brand new site got "mobbed" by the search engines within 30 minutes.... if that's true, I'd love to know how that happened.

    Google treats websites on subdomains as entirely seperate sites - they are not treated differently as far as indexing is concerned, so it does not seem like you've done anything wrong - except that you have not done anything to "get" the search engines attention.

    What have you done as far as off-page SEO? - If you want your new site to get indexed quickly, do these two things:

    1. Submit a sitemap to Google via the Google Webmaster tools

    2. Submit a couple of articles to EzineArticles.com (with links in the author resource section back to your new site using your keywords as the link text, of course)

    Within a day or so, your site should be visited by Google and the other search engines. Then just keep building backlinks, adding content and working on SEO in general.

    Hope this helps a little.
  • I am having a similar problem with hostgator and will be following your post. Hostgator can't seem to answer my questions so hopefully you will get some answers here.

    Have you checked your webmaster tools in google yet?

    You will probably notice that google is being blocked by your robots.txt file or can't access it at all, Even though you have set no blocks for googlebot. If you take out the robots.txt file, you will have the same problem Google was not able to access my sitemap.xml file when using my domain, but when I typed it in as a subdomain, it picked up my sitemap.

    Please see if you are having a similar problem. I should mention that that MSN and yahoo have had no problem picking up my sitemap and crawling my site. There is something buggy about the way hostgator sets up "addon" domains and how google interprets it.

    Let us know what you find out.
  • You'll need to add at least one inbound link for search engine to index your site.

    Ross
    • [1] reply
    • I have a feeling that even creating inbound links will not help. I have 18 inbound links to my "addon" domain with hostgator and google is saying that it can not crawl my site. The problem is that when you purchase an "addon" domain with hostgator, you are actually purchasing a subdomain that will appear like its own seperate domain in your address bar. As far as google is concerned your addon is still a subdomain of your primary domain. I just talked to support at hostgator and they said that the only way to be listed with google is by addondomain.primarydomain.com even though you paid for multiple domains hosting. I wouldn't have transfered my domains to my HG hosting account if I had known this. Please let me know what you find out.
      • [2] replies
  • From the HG Website:

    "Every addon domain is also a subdomain. You may actually load your addon domain in one of three ways:
    Don't worry! Visitors will only know the link you give them; they have no way of knowing which domain is your primary domain and which is the addon domain. To your visitors, the Addon Domain appears to have its own hosting plan.Every addon domain is also a subdomain. "

    In my case, google is accepting my "addondomain.primarydomain.com" but not my addondomain.com with googlebot.
    • [2] replies

    • Mine is subdomain.addondomain.primarydomain.com

      Can't imagine the confusion. Crap, so now I have to move the wp junk to a subdirectory of of the addon instead of as a sub? Is that even possible?
      • [1] reply
    • It's correct but maybe you need to modify you .htaccess to make your sub-domain indexed as your addondomain.com. It happened to me before when I first created the sub-domain and the DNS propagation was so late that is why search engine got the sub-domain first.

      Ross
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
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    WP, hostgator and subdomains

    I just posted a new wp site and something is messed up. The site looks fine, everything is there as it should be. The problem is google hasn't sniffed it and I have the SEO plugin installed. Last wp site I posted got mobbed within 30 minutes by search engines. It's in an add-on domain, but this is the first time I've created and employed a subdomain system. Since that's the only thing I've done differently, anyone with hostgator subdomain experience that has some insight would be greatly appreciated.