1: Google
Posted by Pevensey and Westham Historical Society on 06/09/21 10:05

We have had a Voice site for two months now, and the site appears on Bing, but not on Google. Is there anything I can do to attract Google's attention? Or have I done something to stop Google seeing the site?

2: Re: Google (response to 1)
Posted by Richard Sullivan on 07/09/21 11:14

Have you tried changing the keywords for your Home page (at the bottom of the edit tab in content management)? If you have only one or two try putting lots in - such as talks, events, discussions, local, community etc. I do not know if this will work but worth trying.

3: Re: Google (response to 1)
Posted by Richard Sullivan on 07/09/21 14:48

Actually the Description is the thing to use, Keywords are no longer used by Google, see https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/special-tags

I found this page from looking at the Reports in e-voice for the community, Site Statistics, Robots/Spiders visitors. Googlebot is shown and links through. For reference my site was crawled over giving 231 Hits in August, the last visit was 6th September

I noticed that you have a small map on your home page, did you see the small map error (now fixed by admin) when you created the site? Perhaps Google objected to that?

4: Re: Google (response to 3)
Posted by Pevensey and Westham Historical Society on 23/09/21 12:14

Thanks, Richard. Oddly enough, there was one hit fro Google in July - beofre the small map error, which I reported. If google is crawling to my site now and again (which it seems to be doing) but I'm not showing up in Google searches, it might have put the site onto the naughty step. I wonder what I can do about that.

5: Re: Google (response to 4)
Posted by Voice Admin on 23/09/21 13:48

I've gone to the google search console and requested that it indexes your site.

I'll keep an eye on it and see that it does indeed index it correctly and without any errors!

Thanks

Joe

7: Re: Google (response to 5)
Posted by Pevensey and Westham Historical Society on 30/09/21 13:50

Thanks very much, Joe

 

Alan

6: Re: Google (response to 1)
Posted by Voice Admin on 29/09/21 15:47

I've spent a bit of time looking into this and ensuring that the sitemap of all Voice websites is loading correctly, in Google's search console.

Currently Google are reporting that your site is Discovered - currently not indexed.

Google's documentation says this means that: The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl.

Elsewhere in the search console, Google reports that it has had no problems with crawling the Voice site in the last 90 days. So I don't think there's any problem on the Voice side that has caused this. I guess it was just busy crawling lots of other pages on Voice sites and decided that crawling your site at that moment would have been too much!

I have specifically asked for the site to be indexed and it says that it's been added to a priority queue, and also that there are apparently no problems with loading the page. So I guess we just have to wait!

There are a few other Voice sites in this same state, though only a very small percentage of the total number of sites. The vast majority are crawled and indexed.

I'll keep an eye on the info in the search console over the next few days/weeks to see if the situation changes.

Thanks

Joe - Voice Admin