My Website content is invisible to search engines

Do you have access to the server – like SFTP access, shell access, or even remote access? Basically do you have a way of seeing the files on the actual server? If so, make a copy of the robots.txt file first – name it something like old_robots.txt. Next read up on what this file is and what it “informs” web crawlers (like Google search) where it can crawl. In most cases it should look something like the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This tells web crawlers they can search everywhere on the site. Please note that this does not guarantee that your site will show up high in search results. Rather it just means your content is more likely to show up. It may take a few days before a web crawler visits and “crawls” your site – there is no immediate way up to the top of the search rankings unless you manage to get a large amount of sites on the internet interested and linking to your site on day one (unlikely and it may flag your site for possible black-hat Search Engine Optimization abuses).

Anyway, hope this helps. Good luck with your site and books!

“A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt”

Looks like that you do not have a description meta tag. Your robots.txt file is OK.

Looks like that you do not have a description meta tag.

Where the heck do I write a description?

there is no immediate way up to the top of the search rankings unless you manage to get a large amount of sites on the internet interested and linking to your site on day one

I’m not looking to get to the top of the search rankings; I’m just trying to get my content to appear.

Nothing I’ve written appears on any search engine. When I post comments on Websites, they appear in Google on the same day.

Why is the content on my Website invisible?

P.S. I’ve just found my first Google hit:

“A letter to David Shiner and Bill Irwin.”

When I just searched “Anatomy of a German Flamethrower Attack” on Google again, THIS TOPIC appeared! So this forum is instantly appearing on Google, but my Web pages aren’t.

Some themes may have built-in features to add meta tags (like description). If you do not find them, you may need to use an SEO plugin to add these features. Also check if you have left the tagline (dashboard > General Settings) empty.

The tagline has “Welcome to my world!” written in it, which I didn’t write.

Even so, this doesn’t appear on search engines. In Bing, here’s what it says:

“We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.”

My former Website was changed to https://thomaswictor.net/

On Bing and Google, the description for the Dot Net site says:

“How a former music journalist survived ten insane years in the Los Angeles music scene.”

If you Google the title of my soon-to-be-published novel “Chasing the Last Whale,” you’ll find it on the “About” page on the Dot Com Website and on the “News” pages of the Dot Net Website.

However, I have five more pages on it on the Dot Com Website, and none of them appear on Google.

https://www.thomaswictor.com/books/chasingthe-last-whale/

Could this be a coding problem? My Web designers made tons of errors. Could they have somehow screwed up the coding so that some pages of my Website show up on search engines but others don’t?

When you Google “A letter to David Shiner and Bill Irwin,” the description says:

“A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt”

I found this information on the forum here:

“The robots.txt file is dynamically generated by WordPress. WordPress does not provide a way to get rid of it.”

So can I at least reset it so that it lets descriptions through? Or do I have to get a plugin to override this “feature”?

You can find your site’s indexed pages by Google here. You may visit your Google webmaster tools account and look for the indexed pages, errors (if any) notified by them, and in general look for other problems and make corrections. You will find all aspects of indexing and other issues at your webmaster tools account. You may also use the help links there for further assistance with the problem. In fact, indexing and related issues are NOT WordPress problems.

I didn’t understand a thing you just wrote. My knowledge of Websites is frozen in 2003, the last time I had one.

Back in those days, the designers did everything for you. Today, they promise you that they will, but they don’t.

I guess I’ll just have to threaten a lawsuit.

Try: https://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters

I’m doing that now. They have totally incomprehensible methods of verifying ownership of Websites. I can’t figure any of them out, so I’m just going to give up and tell the Web designers tomorrow that unless they fix my problem, I’ll sue them.

Anyway, thanks for trying.

I’m having the exact same problem as Thomas. I built my own site and had checked off disallowing sites to index me (or at least requesting that they not), but even now that I’ve unchecked the box I’m still not finding my stuff. I don’t think that robots.txt is the problem, because my file is set only to disallow my wp-admin. I was going to try “disallow: ” to allow everything, but I can’t seem to find the file (except for when bing shows it to me).