After 7 months of work I am not indexed in Google.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Chris Lee Vella: Hi all. I was referred to this community by a member here.
  
  I've been having an SEO problem with one of my blogs and I "think" it is serious.
  
  After 7 months of work, as you can see my work is not getting indexed into Google.
  
  Now I've asked for some advice and the advice I've gotten was:
  
  Set the preferred URL on WMT and also add a new sitemap. I've did both and so far, more pages were indexed but not all. ;
  
  Is this a waiting game? Does anybody have a fix for this? Did anybody experience this before?
  
  I would appreciate any help you can give me. Many thanks! ;
  
  Chris Lee
• 
  Jim Munro: I am not an expert, Chris, but generally this is an indication that some of your pages are either duplicated or are "thin" content. Would you mind sharing your URL with us? (Please use a disabled link.)
• 
  Chris Lee Vella: I really don't feel comfortable sharing URLs in public but I can tell you that none of my content is duplicate and all posts are an average of 700+ words. I write them all myself and I don't hire writers.
  
  Thanks for replying, I appreciate your help. ;
• 
  Thomas Rosenstand: If you don't want to share URL in public why would you want it indexed by Google?
• 
  Chris Lee Vella: I have my reasons +Thomas Rosenstand...
• 
  Ryan Cramer: Yeah, without a URL, it can be a lot of speculation. I like +Jim Munro ;advice about "thin" content - that's where those 700 words are keyword rich but content empty, AKA keyword stuffing.  ;
  
  9 times out of 10 I've found when a site isn't getting indexed in less than a month (depending on the size of the site), it has more to do with the header information.  ;This could be something as simple as having the wrong charset defined in your meta tags, multiple redirects, or an issue with the security settings of the server that can be seen in the raw headers.  ;Sometimes, on shared servers the IP can be penalized and a change in hosting may be necessary. One tool I use is Web-sniffer to check my header information.
• 
  Chris Lee Vella: Actually I think it's more the other way round +Ryan Cramer ;. For the first few months I did no keywords research whatsoever. Maybe that could be the problem? ;
• 
  Chris Lee Vella: Just to update: Just noticed that with the new sitemap, I'm already up to 43 indexed pages and 105 submitted.
  
  So was it the sitemap?  ;
• 
  Ryan Cramer: I think you got it +Chris Lee Vella! I knew there was one more simple thing, and I believe it was sitemaps. Now that you've got it to where you are being indexed, you should be set to work on the keywords to improve placement
• 
  Chris Lee Vella: So you think it is the sitemap?
  
  I've also noticed that in All In One SEO, under the "Noindex settings", I have the Categories, Date Archives and Author Archives all ticked. ;
  
  Is that right or wrong? I really don't know how they got like that. ;
  
  Thanks for your help +Ryan Cramer ;. ;
• 
  Jim Munro: Are the ;Categories, Date Archives and Author Archives pages URLs also in your sitemap?
• 
  Ryan Cramer: AIOSEO is one of the few plugins I actually like and there is a lot available on how to tweak it.  ;I was worried about the jump from 70 urls submitted to 105, but that explains it.  ;WP does not natively do a good job with promoting category and author pages, so there are some tweaks needed to promote those URLs.  ;If you don't have content on the category, author and dates that is valuable to your site, I recommend unchecking them from AOISEO.
• 
  Rob Maas: The "index" pages you see there are only the indexed pages that also appear in your sitemap ( and they must match exactly !! CAPS and all), could well be that Google indexed other pages (or versions of urls) ; too.
• 
  Evgenii Neumerzhitckii: Here are percentages of indexed sitemaps . Data is taken weekly from the page you shown in Google Webmaster Tools.
  
  55%
  87%
  91%
  94%
  20%
  71%
  84%
  
  This data is for a big site with 10K+ sitemap URLs. As you can see it jumps a lot from week to week.
• 
  Joey Gedgaud: If Google finds that the pages are duplicate than it will only index it once. It also doesn't index pages it doesn't understand and needs particular meta data. ;
• 
  Chris Lee Vella: So you're saying this is normal +Evgenii Neumerzhitckii ;?
• 
  Chris Lee Vella: Just a quick update: 24 hours has passed since I resubmitted my sitemap and these are the results:
  
  106 URLs submitted
  87 URLS Indexed
  
  So I guess it has been solved right? ;
  
  I'm also wondering if this will lead to extra traffic, is that possible? ;
• 
  Ryan Cramer: I just saw a post from another friend of mine that may help others with similar issues with indexing to do an SEO audit: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/diy-seo-audit/
• 
  Jim Munro: It's a useful post. :)
• 
  Evgenii Neumerzhitckii: +Chris Lee Vella ;Yes, we log submitted/indexed sitemap numbers weekly and they do fluctuate a lot for our site. I have no idea why though. It looks like it does not affect Google impressions/clicks for us.
• 
  Chris Lee Vella: Thanks you all. I'm up to 91 URLS Indexed so I guess it is sorted but I'll still follow up on the advice given here. ;
  
  Thank you kindly
• 
  Tony McCreath: WordPress is great but a few times I've seen plugin mania causing multiple sitemaps. Using the wrong one may result in items that don't match reality.
  
  The index count is partially there to tell you if your site map matches what pages you really have. 
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:56:48 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/after_7_months_of_work_i_am_not_indexed_in_google +Chris Lee Vella
  
  The cuetimes listed on this page are functional while the live broadcast continues and also once Youtube has finished processing the public broadcast. Processing time varies between 6-24 hours. During this period the clip is viewable in full but the cuetimes cannot be relied on.
  
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