Why isn't my site being indexed by Google?
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Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives? A few things to note:
- I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress
- Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked
- A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors
- I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred
- There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains
- The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts
- I have linked up the account to a Google+ page
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You might be better off starting over with a new domain. Getting the penalty lifted can be a long road and if you have little invested in keeping the domain,(links etc) I'd move on. Maybe the ".org" version of your name, assuming the penalized one was a ".com"
Best,
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Turns out we had a Pure Spam manual action on our domain. I'm assuming this was due to a previous owner's shady activities since the domain was first registered in 2011. I've submitted a detailed request for review.
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