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    4. Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions

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    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions

    Technical SEO
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    • ruggero
      ruggero last edited by

      Hi there,

      I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you.

      Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason.

      Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st.

      What do you think? What could be the reason for that?

      Thanks guys!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • ruggero
        ruggero last edited by

        Thanks for your detailed and helpful response, Peter!

        I went through all of your links and I found several matches between the examples provided there and our situation, especially for what concerns the domain's recency.

        We'll have a couple of weeks of patience to see if something in Google's SERPs is moving, otherwise we'll start trying to "force" search engines to start seeing and trust our site. And also maybe ask directly to Google for a re-evaluation.

        Many thanks, I'll update this post if something relevant will come up, in order to help other facing similar issue that can occur them in the future.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Mobilio
          Mobilio last edited by

          This could be issue called "sandbox" and here you can see more about it: https://moz.com/blog/googles-sandbox-still-exists-exemplified-by-gradercom https://moz.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-google-sandbox https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-sandbox-2-0-know/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_effect

          So i think that this could be your problem with site launched on 1st Dec. How to make show in SERP and escaping sandbox isn't possible with some "cheats". Fastest site appearing was 3 days, normal timeframe is between week-10 days. If site didn't appear after 2 weeks then this could be due some crawler problem.

          Now you could do two things:

          1. Share links in social networks - Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest. This will bring bots in your site. Just don't rush things - i have seen some in panic webmaster dumping 100 links in social networks. Also don't attach too much homepage just one time is normal. But attach inside pages - about us, services, products, blog section, etc.
          2. Start linkbuilding acquiring links from authoritative and trusted sources. This is tricky... very tricky! I have seen webmasters creating so much links so site get penalized after "sandboxing" after 2-3 days.

          I hope that this will give you ideas why new sites didn't show from day 1 in SERP pages.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
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