Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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  • October 10, 2014 at 12:32 pm #333816
    Fionadee

    Hi,
    While developing this site, I checked “Discourage search engines from indexing ” .
    Then, around 10 days ago, I moved to a “Coming Soon” setup and unchecked the box, so that indexing could begin. Unfortunately, Google is still not recognising the website. Is this because I have a coming soon page as my front page?

    Or is it more likely to be connected with a problem we had with name server details (one of the records was missing). This was corrected around 10 days ago. Is it possible that this has caused the urls within the site to be incorrect?

    Any help gratefully received!

    October 10, 2014 at 5:18 pm #333956
    Sandie

    You don’t say how your Coming Soon setup was created. If you’re using a plugin there is a good chance the plugin is set to deliver a http status code informing search engines that your website is unavailable (a code more appropriate for a maintenance page). Read more about SEO and https status codes here – http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes

    Name server/ DNS updates typically update within hours, sometimes depending on your precise settings they can take up to 48 hours.

    You can use http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx to enter your website domain and check what records are available for it.

    Have you set up a Google WebTools account, and submitted a sitemap? If you’re not familiar with sitemaps or SEO in general, I’d recommend installing Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. It’s very popular, very good, and there is plenty of help documentation for it. It will also make it very easy for you get sitemaps setup for your website.

    October 10, 2014 at 7:34 pm #334055
    Fionadee

    Thank you for the swift reply!

    The coming soon page was created using an edited version of the Enfold coming soon page, which I specified as the front page. No plugin was involved.

    The nameservers are now correct. But I’m concerned that there may be incorrect URLs within the site, During the time that the nameserver info was missing the URL was showing as http:// rather than http://www. Would this cause a problem? If so, can I check to see if the wrong URL is embedded in the code? I’m new to WordPress and I’m not sure where to look.

    I have installed Yoast and will look at the documentation.

    October 14, 2014 at 7:05 am #335387
    Arvish

    Hey!

    Your site was indexed and comes up on google search:

    The rest would depend on SEO more than anything.

    Best regards,
    Arvish

    October 14, 2014 at 9:15 am #335453
    Fionadee

    Problem solved!
    Using Yoast SEO plugin > SEO settings > XML Sitemap, I found that the index xml file could not be located and gave a 404 error. There is a reference to this problem here: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-yoasts-wordpress-seo-sitemap-404-error/
    I added the following recommended code to the start of the .htaccess file: 

    # WordPress SEO - XML Sitemap Rewrite Fix
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^sitemap_index\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress SEO - XML Sitemap Rewrite Fix

    Back in Yoast, SEO > SEO settings > XML Sitemap, the sitemap was found.
    I submitted the sitemap to Google, 12 hours later, success!
    Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

    • This reply was modified 10 years, 1 month ago by Fionadee.
    October 15, 2014 at 3:31 am #335882
    Ismael

    Hey!

    Glad you figured it out. Thanks for sharing the fix. :)

    Cheers!
    Ismael

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