Weebly site not showing on Google Search (site verification and sitemap done)

[TextAndTables]

I could use some advice on why my website is not appearing in Google search. I believe I have followed all of the appropriate steps to register my site - I have added my site verification code to the Weebly page, and loaded the sitemap.xml onto Google - both show as successful under my Google Search Console account. My website is textandtables.weebly.com.

1. On Google’s “URL Inspection” page, the message is “URL is not on Google”.
2. Under the “Coverage” subsection, the message is “URL is unknown to Google”.
3. Performing a “Test Live URL” on this page shows “URL is available to Google” and I can view the tested page successfully. No errors are shown and availability says “URL can be indexed”.

4. From google.com, when I search simply for site:textandtables.weebly.com and the result is “Your search - site:textandtables.weebly.com - did not match any documents.”

My site has been published since October. I republished a newer version in January. After not getting found on Google, I tried the same setup steps in Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Clarity - both work. This leads me to think the issue with only with Google. I've read through all of the Google tips and nothing seems applicable.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Adam7]

Welcome to the Community, @TextAndTables. I agree with you that the issue seems to be with Google - it's pretty weird that they haven't indexed your site when it's been published for months.

@whitemonkey, I think you're more familiar with Google Search Console than I am. Do you have any suggestions on what @TextAndTables can do to get Google to index the site?

[whitemonkey]

@Adam @TextAndTables 

i saw this this morning too, seems like your MO was sound     .

please enclose screen shots of the the code  AND where u pasted it..... worth double checking

[TextAndTables]

Thank you @Adam and @whitemonkey. Appreciate your willingness to help me on this!

My Google site verification code was entered into SEO... Settings... Header Code... (along with the MS ones which were added later):

And Google Search Console shows me as successfully verified under Settings... Ownership verification...

Let me know if any other screen shots would help. Thanks in advance!

[whitemonkey]

@TextAndTables @Adam 

a screen shot of you submitting the yoursite.xml       ??????    has to be a reason somewhere    , i know GSC can be fical sometmes like refusing to index pages   but the hole site ????

[TextAndTables]

@whitemonkey 

I submitted my original sitemap back in October and then resubmitted in January when I was trying to troubleshoot this myself:

I've read things about Google being finicky, including they don't bother with your site if it isn't "interesting" enough, and how you should have a blog to keep the site content changing.  But I just wanted a simple site and didn't think it would be so tricky.

Thanks in advance for any more ideas.

[whitemonkey · Accepted solution]

@TextAndTables 

Google , u gotta love them    ..  i know they were not INDEXING pages for a while    Maybe this is when u were trying to submitt a new site

BUT  try re submitting it    ... i do mine every other day AND when i make a new post

also try  URL inspection..... at least for your home page

[TextAndTables]

@whitemonkey

- Thanks for the tip to resubmit the sitemap, never thought of doing that so frequently. I will try it.

- I've been doing the URL Inspection already, I'll keep trying that too.

- I had done a 'request reindexing' here and there in the beginning and read that google doesn't like that either, so I stopped trying that.

Thanks for the ideas, appreciate your time.

[whitemonkey]

@TextAndTables 

when i post a new page, i submitt the sitemap and then inspect the url     everytime  .

many times the page is listed as CRAWLED, INDEXED, SUBMITTED   but it wont show on Google   with a site:   this is googles issue... it has many issues

[whitemonkey]

@TextAndTables 

do u add ALT TEXT to your Weebly images ?

what SEO for your site are you adding?   SETTINGS >>  SEO   re   Site description and Meta key words ???

dt forget to hit SAVE   (bottom left)   AND publish each time

[TextAndTables]

@whitemonkey

- Yes, I've added ALT for all the images that I've posted.  Bing's tool showed me warnings that all images should have ALT tags, but the only ones that don't are the ones Weebly created so I can't control that. I don't understand why Weebly isn't following the best practices.

- I've also recently (1-2 days ago) added H1 tags on all my pages through custom HTML code. I've  read posts that it's also good for SEO and other posts wondering why Weebly doesn't create the automatically (some back in 2016 even).

- For SETTINGS... SEO, I do have my site description and meta keywords entered (comma separated like it says), which have been set from the beginning. Footer Code is the only blank on this page.

- I also have SEO keywords set on each page (Page... <page name>... Header Type/SEO Settings...

Thanks.

[whitemonkey]

@TextAndTables 

re H1 tags...... i read that they used H2   in the titles, to stop people dragging multiple h1 tags to the page... doubley bad  for SEO

there are some h+ tag and a h1 tag apps in the weebly app center   though one cannot link the text   or adjust it too much. these are from editortricks... they work well.   i also tried using another 3rd party h1 tag app but was full of bugs  

lets hope Google indexes or rather lists your site soon

[TextAndTables]

@whitemonkey

Good point about trying to avoid multiple H1 tags, hadn't thought of that as a Weebly consideration. I also hadn't looked at the apps, the custom HTML tags works well for me at the moment.

Do you think I can safely do a 'request indexing' again (or even regularly) on the URL inspection page? Or do you think I'll get 'penalized' as I've read I would?

The only other odd Weebly thing I've noticed is that, though my robots.txt file is getting updated (I know cause I've changed some filenames in this list), Weebly left some old orphaned pages which I had listed for a while as 'hide this page from search engines' but later decided to remove them.  The 2 files in the red circle no longer exist (the 2 with '-old' in the filename are valid), and Weebly won't remove them from robots.txt.  I can't imagine that would prevent Google from indexing my other pages (like it's trying to read robots.txt to see what files to ignore, and it can't find the files to ignore), would it?

[whitemonkey]

@TextAndTables 

this is getting a bit out of my league now....

but i  know that if u block a page    and then un block it, it takes FOREVER for google to crawl it

can u share your custom h1html with me?   

i used to use a lot of code which turns out was very badly written  but some how functioned    am just using h2 now and to hell with it.   but would be keen to try another way

[TextAndTables]

For the custom html code, drag the "Embed Code" Weebly function to your page, and then it's can be as simple as: <H1>your heading text here</H1>

The default font is a bolded large black color that will display your text.

On my main index.html page, I added simply:

<H1>Freelance Professional</H1>

On my sub pages, I wanted white text (because it was on a dark background), so I added:

<h1><font color="white">Proofread Technical Content</font></h1>

Hope this helps. Thanks for your advice and quick replies. We'll wait to see if Google has a change of heart about indexing my site soon.

Thanks again!

[whitemonkey]

@TextAndTables @Adam 

pls check   :

site:textandtables.weebly.com

seems they have indexed your site     at least one page shows up  

[whitemonkey]

@TextAndTables 

had modified the code a bit   but this works   for embed code element:

<h1 style="text-align:left;font-size:30px;letter-spacing:0.04em;line-height:1.4;margin-bottom: 15px;color:#282828;font-family:montserrat;"> Thoughts on Sponsorship and Advertising</h1>

[TextAndTables]

Thank you for checking @whitemonkey. Wow, indeed you are right - I can search for my 'site:' in google.com and the 'URL Inspection' now shows "URL is on Google"!  Finally, well that only took 6 months from my original website publish date.

It feels like the main fix was your tip to reload my sitemap file (which I will now do after every republish), followed by a 'URL inspection' and a 'request indexing' afterwards. I wonder if me adding h1 tags the other day might have helped too.

Thank you so much, I'm glad to see this finally looks resolved. Phew!

[whitemonkey]

@TextAndTables 

i inspected ur ite too and the H1 is listed.

i am using the code i gave u, a few hours ago and its also listed as being H1  when i 'inspect it'

i hope that this will boost my organic traffic

Blogging, its a never ending learning curve

am happy for u that google shows ur site now.... best u submitt and request indexing on a few more pages

best of luck

https://www.nomadicbackpacker.com    aka white monkey

[TextAndTables]

Thanks again. Glad also that you got your H1 tags in place and I'm hoping that it boosts your site.

Happy travels and safe backpacking! Enjoy Mexico

[dondaddasports]

im having this same problem, only sitemap is submitted

dondaddasports.weebly.com

does anyone know fix to this problem