WordPress MU

I don't know what's wrong. I've go MU running. I've got a few people with different blogs on there and not one of them is indexed.

One blog even has a podcast on itunes and google still doesn't know the site(s) are here. Well, actually, the feeds work in google blogs, but the REAL google search is clueless.

It's been 4 or 5 weeks. From what I've read, a lot of people wait longer than a month, But it seems like their home pages get indexed rather quickly. Oh, the sites aren't showing up in any other search engines either, and I have submitted them to google, yahoo, msn, and a few smaller ones.

Can someone point me in the right direction? Am I missing something? I've only got a sitemap on one of the blogs, but that doesn't seem to be doing anything anyway.

This is sooo frustrating.

-Frank

Thanks to anyone that can steer me in the right direction.

If the domain was newly registered try submitting your site to google. Domains that have a few incoming links get indexed much faster than newly registered domains with no incoming links. Google will eventually find it but it can speed things up if you submit it.

Agreed. msn.com has got a couple sites indexed although it's just the top level pages.

I know this sounds silly but have you thought about putting in a list of blogs somewhere on your site? Or a recently updated list? May help get the search engines to find everybody. Or the tag system we worked out a few days ago.

Yeah, I was gonna put a list on the main blog, but someone else wanted to use it and they didn't think it would work wel with the theme of the site, whioh at this point is a joke anyway.

But yeah, the domain was registered about a month ago and it was submitted.

So you guys really think this is because of a lack of incoming links? I read a billion places that links are where it's at and I guess that's how google judges "good material". But that's kinda beat... if they don't list you, you've gotta go begging people for links and that defeats the whole purpose. They can't really find you until google lists you and they won't list you until people find you... :O)

Oh well, thanks for the responses. I'm just paranoid by nature and I am petrified I've done something to keep google from indexing the stuff. I've seen that they have crawled me before, they just chose not to index me.

It hurts.

Only a month? May take up to 3 to show up fully.

Gotta have links.

I did a write up for the folks over on the wp.com forums and posted it up at http://pimpmyblog.wordpress.com if you want to read it.

Hope this helps,
-drmike

Thanks drmike. I'll go check it out!

Did you submit a sitemap.xml file or just an URL?

http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=133
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html

I submitted the url and I'm using a sitemap plugin that is telling me it successfully pings google whenever I rebuild.

But does Google pick up the ping? I'd go check to see if you have errors on Google's end.

I would suggest going her: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and creating a google account. there you can see the status of your site, you can submit your sitemap there, you can see when google accessed your site, what errors / problems ocured, etc...

Ok I did that and the error i get is im missing 20 pages? These were posts I deleted. I was playing around with an aggregator and I had some junk up there that was messing up my rss, so I had to delete them.

Thats the only issue I've got in the webmaster tools.

What I'd like to know is... how do they keep track of that when I'm not even indexed? Are they getting that from the RSS on google blogs?

did you look at the date when google reported it did not find those pages? when did google report these errors? they might be old.

did you resubmit your sitemap since then? resubmit it via the webmastertools, maybe even verify your site?

did the setcion in the webmaster tools tell you you are not indexed or did you already try a search for: site:yourdomain.com in google to see if you are indexed?

Google should have given you an error about those 20 pages and stated why it couldn't find those pages.

I those errors are from jan 29th. I have submitted the sitemap since with no problems. They are all 404 errors.

Google webmmaster tools says my homepage was last accessed yesterday Jan 1 and that I am not yet indexed.

OK here's something I just realized...

Everyone was submitting sitemaps from various blogs in the WPMU admin panel. They were overwritting the same sitemap.

I assume this is a huge issue. Any comments? Is there a way to avoid this? Or do all the blogs need to be somehow linked off the main page... and then I submit one all encompassing sitemap for everyone from there?

try a search for sitemap, somewhere here was a discussion abot how the sitemap plugin from arne was modified to work with wpmu, as far as I remember basically the paths had to be modified so that each blog had his own sitemap.

Agreed although I'm still having an issue with site #1. I can live with it though. There is a download of a sitemap plugin over at wpmudev.org. Not sure if this is the modified one or not though.

you can also try the sitecow sitemap plugin advertised here and on wpmudev.org although I have no tested that one yet.

I'll check for the modified arne plugin, but i did try the sitecow plugin and it didn't work. I don't know why... once it a while I come across a plugin that I can activate but that doesn't show up in the CP.

I have to say again, thank you... I really appreciate the time you guys have taken to help me out.

I'll add a nod that the sitecow plugin doesn't work.

Especially for the primary site, which really sucks.

I think it was more of an attention grab than a serious effort.

In case someone should stumble on this looking for sitemap help, google webmaster tools seems to accept rss feeds for sitemaps.

I uploaded the html file to the root directory and I was able to use it to validate each of my sites. Then I submitted the rss feeds and it seemed to work.

I got an error on one of them because my "root element doesn't specify the default namespace" but it worked for all of the others.

Hello,
I had added multiple posts in my blog http://itnews.idlefolks.com and submitted sitemap (http://itnews.idlefolks.com/sitemap.xml) to google. My sitemap is having 30 active links whereas indexing is happening for 20 odd URLs only.
Btw, Google shows that they downloaded recent Sitemap approx 19 hours ago. This shows that google is fetching recent sitemap but not indexing all URLs.
When i see indexed URL in google than i can see that recently added URLs are not getting indexes whereas all old URLs are indexed. Please note that all URLs are original and having sufficient content to be indexed.
Can someone please help in resolving this mystery? I have seen many posts and replies but none is resolving to my satisfaction. Many Thanks for reading this and Many more Thanks if you can reply
Saching