Why isn't our site being shown on the first page of Google for a query using the exact domain, when its pages are indeed indexed by Google
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When I type our domain.com as a query into Google, I only see one of our pages on the homepage, and it's in 4th position.
It seems though, that all pages of the site are indexed by google when I type in the query "site:domain.com".
There was an issue at the site launch, where the robots.txt file was left active for around two weeks. Would this have been responsible for the fact that another domain ranks #1 when we type in our own domain? It has been around a couple of months now since the site was launched.
Thanks in advance.
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Hi Matt,
Thanks for the response and the information. Here's some answers of mine and more info:
- The domain contains no keywords and is a specialist, relatively unknown brand.
- The robots.txt file is still active—forgive me. It's just that for around 2 weeks after launch it was still disallowing indexing of any files and folders on the domain.
- In the search results for the Google UK search engine, I can't see the site appear anywhere in the first 10 pages when typing the domain.com as a query
- I've just now checked in the search results for the Google Brasil (it's a Brazilian company with a brazilian domain), and I can now see the homepage appear in the #1 position, but I cannot see any other pages ranking for the site until the 5th page of the SERPs.
- This is a new site with unique content
- Why do you think that the UK search engine isn't picking anything up?
- Is it an issue that only the first position is showing a page for the domain being queried in the Brazilian search engine?I really appreciate your help in advance.
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Is your domain a brand name or an exact match domain targeting a specific keyword?
If it is an EMD then it could be as simple as your site doesn't rank as well as the others and these types of domain don't have the same benefit they used in terms ranking for the terms they match quickly.
Without the "site:" query in Google it is common to only have one result when doing a domain search - this may have multiple sitelinks under one listing. An example of your typical domain listing would be amazon.co.uk typed into Google - a strong well ranked brand but it only appears once for its domain search on page 1, yet it does have multiple sitelinks for the one listing.
When you say you had a robots.txt live at first - many well ranked sites have them live all the time, but it is more a question of what was in the file? For instance where you restricting access to any or all parts of your site?
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