New site not indexed on Google yet ? Here’s what to do

One of the most popular problems among webmasters is not being able to get indexed by Google despite search engine submissions and long waiting. Google takes time to index some new sites and this can be frustrating. But most of the times, the reasons for Google not indexing your site is from your side, although not many people realize it, and hence to frequent complaint. So if you have a new website and is awaiting indexing by Google, here are a few things that you might want to consider in the first place.

Checklist for search engine indexing.

1. Check if your CMS has an opt in option where, it blocks search engines.

Well technically they shouldn’t but some CMS’s like WordPress has a default option which will be checked already where it will block all search engines from crawling the website. This is to make sure that your website is not indexed while you are only setting up the site. But when you forget to uncheck this option, the CMS adds a Nofollow meta tag to the pages whereby search engines will not crawl the site.

2. Check if you have set the correct Robots.txt

Robots.txt files are used to control (not fully though) search engines crawling the website. Make sure you have not blocked bots from crawling parts of your website.

3. Check if your servers are returning OK status

Use tools like header checker tools to ensure that your server is returning a healthy 200 OK status. Anything else should be dealt with immediately.

4. Set up a sitemap

Sitemaps does not guarantee that your site will be up on the SERPs soon, but they are a necessity. They ensure that we have a route map for the bots to follow. So set up a sitemap before even trying to get indexed.

5. If you run plugins check if they are set properly

Setting plugins like SEO plugins are good. But make sure they are set properly. Some plugins have an option to set nofollow meta tags on pages by default to avoid duplicate content issues, if you do not turn this off, it might screw up the indexing process.

I assume that you have done all the basic steps to invite search engines to your site already. Which are -

1 – To submit the website URL to Google via the submission tool.

2 – If possible, get a relevant contextual link from a good website (which has already been indexed and has good reputation).

Summary

Generally Google takes its own time to index new websites, and the best way to make sure Google indexes your site is to get a very relevant text link from a reputed site, but it isn’t easy always. But however, remember to have the basics health check done, so that when the bots are here, you have everything in place.

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