WordPress is a fantastic platform for building your website and we all know that search engines such as Google, love WordPress. Or do they? I’ve had quite a few people say to me “help, my WordPress website isn’t showing up on Google. So I ask:
- have you submitted your sitemap to Google and other search engines? – check
- have you added Google Analytics to your website? – check
- Do you have some backlinks to your website from good quality websites? – check
So what could it possibly be that it’s not showing up on the search engines?
It’s actually very simple, and something every website owner who creates a new WordPress website should be aware of. WordPress has set it’s default privacy setting so that although visitors can easily see and access your WordPress website, the search engines can’t. Why would WordPress do this? I haven’t a clue but it could explain why so many new WordPress websites aren’t showing up on the search engines and frustrating very many webmasters!
The fix:
Go to settings – privacy. Within there you can then change the settings so that the search engines WILL find your website by changing the option from “only let visitors see this website” to “let everyone including search engines see this website” and then see how quickly your website then gets indexed by Google. It won’t guarantee that all your pages will be indexed, but it will guarantee that at least your front page/index page will be indexed.
