Google noindex problem

[arminunruh]

yes its a setting in wordpress, you set it to:

some people set this during installation

yes @Monamos was correct

[Nzagamba]

@arminunruh i have unchecked this box 1-2 months ago, but nothing happened, still not searchable on google. Am I missing something?

[Monamos]

@Nzagamba do you have a robotics.txt file on the server and also a sitemap.xml file? They will both help too. The robots file specifies if the site is allowed to be crawled.

[arminunruh]

yea i think i heard somewhere it can take ages for google to index your site if you had this setting enabled previously

maybe you can submit your website here somehow
https://search.google.com/search-console/

[Nzagamba]

@Monamos My website, after months, is still not indexed by google. I checked, somehow I do have a robots.txt. When I open tobiasgutmann.com/robots.txt it says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://tobiasgutmann.com/wp-sitemap.xml

Can I delete this somewhere, or change it? Is it a different reason, why google can't find my website?
Glad for any help!

Best,
Tobias

[Nzagamba]

@arminunruh I did submit it on google console, and after months it still says, it does not find the page. I have no idea what else to do. any idea?

[Monamos]

@Nzagamba it really depends what the specific errors are that you are getting. Is it saying the page is set not to crawl, or something else? Also have you generated a proper xml sitemap file? I found that made a difference on my end. This is a good one below. Just enter your url and it will generate an XML map you can put on your server: https://octopus.do/sitemap/resource/generator

[arminunruh]

/wp-admin/
go to settings -> reading. is this activated?

i heard if you ever activated it, google will take ages to index your website

i just added your website to laytheme.com
maybe that will index your website, as layteme.com is indexed and then it might follow that link to your site

[Nzagamba]

@Monamos Thanks for your hints. I now made a sitemap with octopus. I've never done it before. Did I do it correctly?
https://tobiasgutmann.com/sitemap.xml

Question: If I go to tobiasgutmann.com/robots.txt the sitemap links to wp-sitemap.xml, but I don't see this file in my ftp. It is somehow hidden and generated by wordpress. Do I need to change my robots.txt somehow?

Do you recommend working with a SEO plugin, to generate a proper sitemap?

Google console tells me Excluded by “noindex” tag detected in robots.txt: I don't know where to check if I have a noindex tag on my wordpress sites, or how to change it. any hints?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

[Nzagamba]

@arminunruh
I have search engine visibility deactivated for months now, so this shouldn't be the issue. I just described the situation in detail to @Monamos in the above post.

I really hope I can figure this out soon with the sitemap and robots txt... I appreciate any further advice since this whole SEO topic is very unfamiliar to me.

Many thanks for adding my site to your laytheme.com! I feel honoured and hopefully google will see it too. :-)

[Monamos]

@Nzagamba A few thoughts:

• I think you need to update your sitemap url in the robots file, to the new one you made on Octopus and ensure it's uploaded to your server.
• I would suggest checking all your site pages and make sure there are none that have a no-index. You can do this by viewing the source and looking in the header. Make sure that nowhere in any of your page headers is a setting stating <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">. As I understand, if Google spots this, it will flag it as noindex even if you have other pages that don't have it.