2 builders who never spoke to each other
Check the new site is crawlable at all
A site that returns nothing in search is usually blocked rather than unloved: look for a blanket disallow in robots.txt and the WordPress setting that hides a site from search engines. The same holds after a domain move, where rankings drop and come back once a sitemap is submitted, pages are pushed for indexing and canonical URLs are repaired. Check on day one, not when the traffic fails to arrive.
The method
- 01
If a newly launched site returns nothing in Google at all, look for a blanket disallow in robots.txt and untick the WordPress reading setting that hides the site from search engines.
- 02
After moving a product to a new domain, check search rankings immediately, then submit a sitemap and repair canonical URLs to recover them.
What it returned
The tell is a robots.txt containing a wildcard user-agent followed by a disallow of the site root. The toggle sits under Settings then Reading in WordPress.
Zue's rankings tanked during a domain transition and jumped back after he added a sitemap, submitted pages for indexing and fixed canonical URLs.
Sources
- What Is the Indexed, Though Blocked By Robots.txt Message? - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · New Site Not Appearing in Search Results At All? · 2023-10-17
- The Indie Hackers "30 Days of Growth" challengeCory Zue · coryzue.com · Day 6 · 2019-07-01
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
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