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I'm new here. On WordPress.com (duh), I try to search for my own posts just to see how easy it would be for someone to find them. But I can't get any of my post to come up when searching. I put in a lot of the keywords that are in my post. I even do a search for my own blog page (putting in my blog name) and nothing comes up. All of my settings are set to allow the public to access my blogs. What is happening here?
The blog I need help with is automotivenation.wordpress.com.
This is a very common and repetitive query that new bloggers post to the forum. We frequently hear from those who have written 1 or 2 posts and who can't find them simply because they have not been indexed by the 3 big search engines.
Assuming you verify ownership of your blog with the 3 big search engines, and you hunker down and begin to create an archive of high quality unique content blogging 5 days of the week, did you know that the average time frame before one sees their blog posts surfacing in the SERPS (search engine page results) is 4 - 6 weeks? Granted this timeframe may be shorter if any of your posts has been backlinked to by other bloggers in their new posts, or if any posts "go viral". It's important that you correctly tag and categorize all of your posts and that the combined total of categories and tags on any post does not exceed 10.
Privacy settings - http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/
Verification - http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
PageRank - Blog Strategy - http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2009/05/26/blog-strategy-google-sandbox-or-trustbox/
Also note this entry and act on it http://en.support.wordpress.com/sitemaps/#xml-sitemaps-for-search-engines
Thanks...great info. Does this include when someone tries to search for my blog on WordPress? When I go to the WordPress homepage and do a search for my own blog (automotivenation), no search results come up. I also use that name in the tags for each post.
Thanks
The most recent post on your blog http://automotivenation.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/it-must-have-been-some-bad-korean/ has 18 tags and 2 categories. It's amazing that it does appear on the tagging pages as Staff have stated the maximum combined total for tags and categories is ten
http://en.wordpress.com/tag/automotivenation/
Recognizing that mistake, I greatly reduced the amount of tags I had for that post (and I will do so in the future). But were you able to do a search through WordPress and find my blogs? I know that I could give people the address and they could use that, but it's just a little irritating that searching with the name of my blog does not come up with any results.
As TT has said, it can take six weeks for a new blog to come up on search engines. And the WordPress search is not blogname based; it's content based. When your blog turns up in the search, it'll be for words you used in your posts, not the name of your blog. The name of the blog is more easily searchable in Google and other external search engines.
Hi automotivenation,
Might I suggest, having just had a look at your last post, that you work at keeping your paragraphs quite a bit shorter - it makes text much easier to read on the screen. I know, I don't always take my own advice, but mostly I do.
And, as TT says, writing is what it's all about - get your stuff out there, properly tagged and categorised - heed what TT says about that. If it's well-written, and interesting to a wide-enough segment of society, people will read it.
And those two points are vital - no matter how perfect your tags and categories are, quality and content are the biggies. See http://ronsrants.wordpress.com/2009/12/26/attract-visitors-to-your-blog-first-step-write-one/
Just bear in mind that, by writing about cars, you've chosen a very heavily-subscribed subject - i.e., you have a huge amount of competition.
Unlike baseball fields, "If you build it, they will come," doesn't apply to blogs. Just being there isn't enough - you have to make your presence felt. Give people what they want to read, and they'll come. Just not right now.
Thanks for everyone's help. All of it is great information that I will put towards my future post.
Ronsrealm, I know I picked a very crowded subject. But for some reason, I don't really feel competitive. That's pretty weird for me to feel that way. I'm just writing (slowly) about what I know and what I feel passionate about. It is like I have all of these ideas, opinions and stories bouncing around in my head and I feel relief when I am able to write them out. Hopefully, as I get better at writing, I'll get more competitive. For right now, I'm just trying to get these thoughts to paper.
By the way, your links were great. I'm going to print them out and study them.
Thanks again.
I'm still not clear about whether or not you have verified your blog ownership with the 3 big search engines, and whether or not you have submitted a sitemap. These are important things to do as most of the referrals most bloggers receive come from search engines.
Also, after looking at your blog, I really must say write more. You have two posts, one being your hello world post. No matter how much SEO you do, how much referring you do, and how nice you make it look, at the end of the day, no one will come to your site if you have nothing there.
Agreed and we still do not know whether or not he has taken the basic steps:
(1) get a Google webmasters account
(2) verify ownership of the blog with the big 3 search engines
(3) submit a sitemap
I know, I know... I'm a little slow at this. I'm still trying to take baby steps. I have verified my blog to the big three with the sitemap being my next step. I'm going to read up on this before jumping in (I 'm clueless when it comes to the sitemaps). I guess I'm wanting to take care of the technical stuff before I write much more. I have a lot of postings saved on my computer that are going to my blog and I'm currently writing a few more.
Thanks again for everyone's help. I'm hoping to go from baby steps to running soon.
If it makes you feel any better, it wasn't until recently that I did verify my blog with the three major search engines, and I still haven't to this date given them a sitemap, because I thought (and thus far my observations confirm this), that wordpres (both com and org, but especially com), already generates good sitemaps.
Oh, by the way, you really need to change your about page, and possibly your blogroll (unless you really want to link people to wordpress.com and wordpress.org).
The #1 mistake beginners make is holding off till the blog is "perfect" before writing anything. A blog with no contents isn't perfect; it isn't anything.
No real artist would spend more time picking the frame than they would painting the picture. Just blog.
(4) Blog 5 days weekly and promote every post you publish. Know that until you have built an archive of optimized high quality original content that gets search engine attention and is fully indexed, you will not experience an increase in targeted traffic, and other bloggers will not begin to locate and backlink to your posts.
I am very new to blogging, too. I've started one today to chronical, mostly for family and friends, our upcoming family adventure to Ecuador. Now that I've created the blog and posted an initial entry, how do I get a link to everyone who wants to keeps tabs on us that they can read future postings? What do the tags do and how do I choose and set them up?
Re-reading my lat text, I guess I need to learn how to use spellcheck in wordpress (it's chronicle NOT chronical, dufus!), but I'm also curious how to register ownership of a blog with the major search engines, as suggested above. Can anyone walk me through that process?
@tahoeluke
Ummm ... I posted all the links to the support documentation, which are step by step and illustrated here http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/i-cant-find-myself-when-searching?replies=18#post-419757
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timethief
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