So it’s been months since you submitted your URL to Google, still it’s yet to index your wordpress blog and this has got you all worked up. Here’s a simple solution that I applied when I was facing the same dilemma.
Follow my guide and you’ll be indexed as soon as possible; 3 days max as it was in my case.
Install Google XML Sitemaps and create a sitemap of your blog at once. The plug-in’s configuration page is quite explanatory and on your first run, you really might not need to tweak any setting. You can click on learn more beside each entry for more info on the various options included in the plug-in. The sitemap created will be automatically stored in your wordpress installation folder.
NOTE: If your blog is in a subdirectory and you also want to include pages outside of your blog directory into the sitemap, you have to relocate your sitemap. Just scroll down the configuration page to Location Of Your Sitemap File to do that.
Create a robots.txt file and install it in the same location as your sitemap. Check out Google’s tutorial for creating robots.txt. Here’s an example of a good robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/
Disallow: /blog/wp-includes/
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/uploads/
Simply copy and paste the above into a new text file using Notepad, save it as robots.txt and upload it to your server.
When you are done, sign into Google’s Webmaster and follow the well detailed instructions there to add and verify your blog ownership after which you’d be asked to add your sitemap’s URL.
Once you’re past this hurdle, Google will try and access your sitemap and robots.txt in less than 6hrs. If everything goes well, your blog will be indexed in 3 days.
To further enhance indexing of your blog by Google, create a sitemap page using Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. Check out my sitemap page.
Best of luck getting your blog indexed and enjoying organic traffic from the search engines.
For more blogging tips, be sure to read the following posts:P.S: If you don’t create and upload a physical robots.txt file to your server, Google will NEVER index your site. The robots.txt created by Wordpress is a virtual one and cannot be downloaded or accessed by Google’s bot.
Finally I advice you get a Gmail account to access Google Webmaster’s Tool.
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The XML sitemap is a good way to get indexed as long as you submit the sitemap to Google. But I disagree with you about the robots.txt file. It’s definitely good practice to have that file but not having it won’t prevent your site from getting indexed. I have seem lots of websites that were indexed and had PageRank and still didn’t have a robots.txt. All that file does is tell the crawler where not to go.
@ Sam: Not having a physical robots.txt makes it difficult for you to register your blog using Google’s Webmaster tool.
The robots.txt file is important, and the sitemaps are also key. Do you think that it’s smart to have more than one sitemap? Also, is it true that you can sortof ‘wake up’ google by pinging it with updated blog posts? Especially if the blog is in an rss feed?
Geoff@SD Realty Pros´s last blog ..San Diego Real Estate Prices Part 2
@ Geoff: The Google XML sitemap generator automatically recreates the sitemap & pings google each time you publish a new post. If you’re just updating the post and wish to ping google, you can use Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger
Exactly what I needed. Submitted my sitemap like 2 weeks ago and was getting scared I’d been banned. Well, time for action.
One of the fastest ways to get indexed is to social bookmark one or two of your internal pages (ie: the URL of a specific post, not just the main site). Use something like Socialmarker.com or socialposter.com and very quickly get crawled. I mean FAST. I get my sites indexed within a day, sometimes even less.