Why isn’t my website appearing in Google?

A very good question when you’re with a client, means you have to start looking at possible causes for this and come up with a solution. Yesterday I was asked this very question and proceeded to carryout the usual tests to find out the answers.  The site was built using wordpress by a web company and generally wordpress tends to be indexed very well in search engines.

Google and yahoo reported only one page within their repective indexes, this happened to be the terms & conditions page, probably one of the ones you’d actually put a no-follow on so it doesn’t appear.

After looking at the code in the header section of the page generated the following few lines appeared.

<meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ />

There it is, everypage had been telling the search engine not to index the content and also not to follow any links meaning the whole site has been blocked, by it’s owner and not by the search engines.

In WordPress this is easily done by failing to adjust the privacy settings for the site, as in some cases it’s left to not be indexed.  It’s a farily straight forward procedure which can be carreid out by any user with ADMIN level access following a few simple steps.

Login to your wordpress installation – the address for this is (you will need a user name with admin level access to make the following changes);    http://<YOUR DOMAIN>/wp-admin

You will see a screen that looks similar to the screen shot below.  There will be a difference due to the version of wordpress installed on the website currently.  The section should still be called ‘settings’ (marked with the RED dot).

Click the settings option and the menu should expand to reveal a number of options.

Choose the Option labelled ‘Privacy’ – shown with RED dot – The Privacy Page should appear and you will see two options

Deselect the option labelled: ‘I would like to block search engines’ (It will be selected already)

Select the option labelled: ‘I would like my site to be visible to everyone….’

Click save changes

Logout of Admin area