A Question of Indexing...

Viv's First Blog: 24.1.22

I’ve posted this blog in order to see whether using social media to publicise a website actually does promote Google indexing as suggested on various forums.....I also wanted to reach out to anyone who might be experiencing the same problem.

By way of some background, my Google New Site at https://sites.google.com/view/vivweb01/ was set up in June 2021 and has been added to and viewed by other users regularly since then. I have linked it to both Google Analytics and GSC and set up a UA property to link GA and GSC successfully.

All other major search engines have indexed the site and it has at least 1 external link referring to it in addition to the link included here. The website has received significant amounts of traffic from outside UK, presumably as a result of its index entries on these other search engines.

The material within the site is of potential interest to a number of different groups and some pages have extensive text boxes with plenty of content. Feedback has already been obtained from external users confirming content relevance.

There do not appear to be any major issues with the site’s structure, as reported by GSC, but despite regular requests for indexing through GSC’s URL inspection tool, nothing has been forthcoming in over the last 7 months.

Given the site is clearly indexable by other engines, I’m at a loss to understand why Google has so far failed to index the site. I've heard rumours that it can take up to 6 months for a new site to get crawled without additional promotion via GSC & other tools, but 7 months even after extensive intervention on my part seems excessive.

I’ve asked the Sites community to check whether there is an identifiable blockage on Google indexing, but so far no replies.

Anyone have any ideas ? Is it actually possible to index a new Google site ?

Thanks,

Viv

Update 25.1.22: The plot thickens - a search on Google today for 'vivweb01blog' revealed an index entry for the new blog. Similar searches on Bing and Yahoo yielded no results. My website remains off the Google index but Google Analytics revealed one new user scanning all pages of the site. This may have been coincidence, but could also have been via the link within this blog. 

We can at least conclude from this that whatever blockage is causing the Google indexing failure on the website doesn't extend to the blog. This suggests it might be advantageous for anyone with the same problem to start a blog referencing their website directly via a URL link.

Update 3.2.22: GSC still reports 'site not known to google' for the above website, although the blog itself is listed as indexed. So far, at least, this suggests that opening a google blog has no effect on google indexing for a 'new' google website. The best advice for those in a similar position would be to mention any new website items you particularly want to publicise in a new blog, and keep submitting GSC indexing requests for the blog to ensure the index entry stays up to date.

Update 24.3.22: A new development to report - having used You Tube before for posting a video review of a smartwatch, I noticed at the time that the video material got indexed after a few days. I decided to run a simple experiment to see whether a short video compiled from a Powerpoint slide presentation and containing some advertising and links for the website and blog would get indexed and attract some attention. Looks like to might just have worked - the video has already had a couple of views and comes up 3rd in the list when the title is entered into Google Search - could this be the way to bypass sluggish Google Indexing ? Watch this space...

Viv

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