(Entry was posted by Chris Leonard on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/05/2022).

Why is this site not showing in google searches?

Why is this site not showing in google searches? www.nealbailes.com until a few weeks ago was showing for "knoxville, tn mortgage" at around page 8 of search results. I added some pages where I took the verbiage from wikipedia, I realized that was wrong and deleted the pages or changed to "coming soon." I don`t believe I`ve blocked googlebot crawler in the robots.txt, and have not set a page to â€œnoindex, â€ or ticked the â€œdiscourage search engines from indexing this siteâ€ box in WordPress. Also, when i search site:nealbailes.com in google, the site comes up, so I don`t believe it`s been deindexed. However, I am fairly new to this so some of my assumptions may be wrong, or maybe I am missing something? Thank you for any feedback.

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YOUR ANSWERS

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

Michael Martinez: Based on a quick glance at how the site appeared in the Wayback Machine last December, it looks to me like the site was redesigned in the last few months and that led to changes in the optimization strategy.

13h
Chris Leonard: Thank you. The site showing on Wayback is not how it looked back then, Wayback sometimes shows sites with some css missing. I can`t understand why a site would disappear from google searches (for certain phrases) simply because a wordpress them was changed, and not any content changed. Thanks again for your reply.

11h
Michael Martinez: Chris Leonard Forget the way it looks via CSS. Look at the optimization that was in place in December. It`s different from what`s going on now with the site.

Added on Edit: I see now Tim Capper pointed out the titles. I don`t know what else changed in on-site optimization, but I suspect there was more than just changes to the titles.

11h
Boyd Trimmell: Showing up in Google searches just fine for me.

12h
Chris Leonard: Thank you. I can`t get it to show at all for "knoxville, tn mortgage" thought it used to, so trying figure it out. I appreciate you looking that up.

11h
Boyd Trimmell: Chris Leonard I search on the brand used as the domain name.

I would not except it to rank well for "knoxville, tn mortgage" since the text string "knoxville, tn mortgage" doesn`t appear on the site anywhere.

11h
Tim Capper: Adding to what Michael has said, yup it looks like it has be De Optimised for local search queries and even duplicated the home page (nealbailes.com/home2/)

Take a look at the for example

2019NealBailes.com | Welcome | Knoxville, Tn Mortgage Lender

Current:Home - NealBailes.com | Welcome

You are going to need work through entire site.

11h
Chris Leonard: oh, ok... I understand now. Thank you all very much.

11h
Dahlian R. Lamy: Chris, your website is NOT optimised to do well in search results.

Every Title tag in search results looks like...PAGENAME - NealBailes.com | Welcome

A simple change that you can make that will have some impact on your search results is to replace the word "Welcome" with "Mortgage Expert, Knoxsville, TN" so that each Title tag would then look like...

PAGENAME - NealBailes.com | Mortgage Expert, Knoxsville, TN

Once you make the change, make sure you clear your website cache if you you are using a caching plugin and then submit URL Indexing Requests in GSC.

9h
Christine Hansen: Dahlian R. Lamy Always write unique title tags for every page.

55m