I’m learning a lot with a new site I’m working on – http://www.impactsalaska.com. Christie had designed a static site and was used to typing “impactsalaska.com” into her Google search bar to get to her site. I have found this is not an uncommon practice. Anyway, after I converted her to a WordPress site, mysteriously the listing in Google disappeared. Christie was the first to notice, since that was the way she normally traveled to get to her site. I looked in all the obvious places to see what was causing the problem:
- I looked at her hosting to be sure there weren’t any strange settings in Networks Solutions. Everything looked fine there.
- I deleted her old content in case duplicate content was offending the googlebots.
- I cleaned up the robots.txt file.
- I installed a plug in on WordPress that would automatically submit a sitemap to the search engines.
- I created an account on Google Webmaster Tools and saw that the site had been completely dropped from Google indexing.
- I posted a question on the Google Webmaster Help Discussion group asking for advice.
- Someone on the group suggested I redirect the old pages with a 303 permanent redirect in the .htaccess file, so I did that.
- I resubmitted a requested for reconsideration and waited.
Well, how long are you supposed to wait on a non-existant Google helpdesk? I waited a couple of days. My client was understandably perturbed. Finally, I posted again on the Discussion group – which had now closed and moved to http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en. I believe I now have the answer I overlooked: the Privacy setting in WordPress. I hope to report back tomorrow with an index listing in Google!