website not showing up on google search

[Macky-Mac]

I'm looking for some insight and advice to pass along to a friend. She has a web site that's about 4 months old. If you do a google search for her site, it doesn't show up in the results.

It has an odd name.....nearsmugglesranchllamas.com would be a similar name (yes, she raises llamas, but no it's not the real name of the site, but close enough).

So if you search for nearsmugglesranchllamas.com, shouldn't the site show up in the results? Google results show 3 sites that list domain names that have been registered, but again, the site itself doesn't show up. Network Solutions is the host and she built the site using their site building tool if that makes a difference.

Anybody have any ideas or guesses why it doesn't show up? What can be done so it will show up?

 

[SilentPanda]

See if their is a robots.txt file in her root folder. It might be blocking her site from being searched.

 

[angelwatt]

How long has the site been live? It can take a while before the search engines find it, it's not automatic. You can submit the URL of the site to Google/Yahoo/etc to speed up the process. You can also setup a sitemap.xml file to be submitted to Google using their Webmaster Tools.

 

[Macky-Mac]

How long has the site been live? It can take a while before the search engines find it, it's not automatic. You can submit the URL of the site to Google/Yahoo/etc to speed up the process. You can also setup a sitemap.xml file to be submitted to Google using their Webmaster Tools.

It's been 4 months. Since it wasn't showing up, about a month ago she paid Network Solutions for what she called their "search engine service" which I assume was supposed to do things like submit it to search engines.

See if their is a robots.txt file in her root folder. It might be blocking her site from being searched.

how would it have gotten there? Would that be something that her hosting service would have put there? Or that might it have been generated as part of the site builder program and template from the host?

 

[angelwatt]

It's been 4 months. Since it wasn't showing up, about a month ago she paid Network Solutions for what she called their "search engine service" which I assume was supposed to do things like submit it to search engines.

In that case I would contact Network Solutions and tell them about the situation. Also, did you check out the robots.txt file as suggested by SilentPanda? There's also meta tags that can be placed on pages to keep them from being indexed. You can check if they exist for some reason.

Does the site come up using other search engines e.g., Yahoo, Bing (bleck), Ask, etc.?

 

[Macky-Mac]

In that case I would contact Network Solutions and tell them about the situation. Also, did you check out the robots.txt file as suggested by SilentPanda? There's also meta tags that can be placed on pages to keep them from being indexed. You can check if they exist for some reason.

Does the site come up using other search engines e.g., Yahoo, Bing (bleck), Ask, etc.?

the page doesn't come up on yahoo or bing either.

She did contact Network Solution about the problem and their solution was to sell her the search engine service package which I assume was submitting the name of the site to the various search engines. That was at least a month ago.

I'm thinking you and SilentPanda are onto something with the robots.txt file and/or meta tags thing

 

[angelwatt]

I'm thinking you and SilentPanda are onto something with the robots.txt file and/or meta tags thing

If you'd like, you can private message me the URL for the site and I can take a quick look to see if I can find any issues.

 

[Macky-Mac]

If you'd like, you can private message me the URL for the site and I can take a quick look to see if I can find any issues.

thanks, but I've found she does seem to have such a file on her site....I followed your link and looked around, found some information that showed me how to check for the robots.txt file....and sure enough, there it is!

So thanks to you and SilentPanda

Now the question is, how does she get rid of it?

 

[angelwatt]

Now the question is, how does she get rid of it?

Simply delete the file (through FTP). It's not something that's used very often. That web site linked though talks more about it as to why you may want to use it. If you can't find a good enough reason, then just delete the file.

 

[Macky-Mac]

thanks.....I've sent the info on to her. I suspect this'll clear the problem

 

[Cerebrus' Maw]

Remeber, Google only crawl once every month, so it can take up to four weeks for your site to appear. And even then, it may have a very low ranking. As suggested above, you can submit your sitemap (always a good idea) and request a speed up, but dont think for a second your the only one doing this!

If your running on Apache, make sure there is nothing odd in your .htaccess file either, that blokes crawlers (Many people do this to stop bot-attacks or band width excess usage..)

 

[bettsnirvana]

can you tell me the off page optimization he/she was done? i think he/she just missed something....