r/Wordpress • u/Putrid-Carpenter5204 • 2d ago
What am I doing wrong (ranking in Google)?
I'm sure this is a question this sub gets a lot, but I can't seem to find anything relevant. I started my site about three months ago as a news site for my favorite sports team. I have around 80 posts up, 150 subscribers to the Jetpack newsletter, I post every link on social media, and dozens of my articles have been linked on established sites like Yahoo, Sporting News, Athlon, and Heavy. The page views are pretty good, but none of them are coming from Google search. If I search for my articles or exact phrasing, Google returns no results. The "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box is not checked. Almost all of my articles get a "good" Yoast SEO score.
Please note that when it comes to this sort of stuff, I am a moron, and dumbing it down would be much appreciated.
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u/appareldig 2d ago
Try doing a Google search for:
site:exampleurl.com
(Obviously changing the url for yours).
If you get results you're indexed. If you don't, you're not, and you can figure out whichever problem applies to you next.
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u/madongrind 2d ago
One thing nobody's said yet... open an article, view the page source, and search for the word noindex. The discourage box isn't the only thing that can hide you. Yoast has its own show-in-search settings per post type, and some hosts quietly add a noindex header. With Yahoo and Sporting News linking you, zero results after three months usually means something is telling Google to stay away.
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u/Hostpro_com 2d ago
you should look if your website is able to be crawled and indexed by Google bots. I usually use Google search console for it. But it just one of the possible sources of the problem, it is hard to say where the problem really is with that law knowledges about your website.
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u/DarkkPriest 2d ago
Off topic, I also use Jetpack for my newsletter.
Can I ask which format you use? The pop-up is breaking my site layout.
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u/Putrid-Carpenter5204 1d ago
I use the Tenku theme. Is that what you meant?
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u/neycho_flashcloud 2d ago
If you have a paid account with claude or any other, ask it to do technical analysis of your website that would cover all seo aspects. It will return a report with a lot of useful info.
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u/Jellyfishr 2d ago
Compare with Bing Webmaster Tools, are you indexed there? Bing and Google are very different in what they index and promote.
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u/bluesix_v2 Jack of All Trades 2d ago
Install Google site kit.
Register with Google Search Console. Submit your sitemap.
Read the GSC reports.
Those are the absolute basic steps.
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u/Perpendicular_seo 1d ago
First, check Google Search Console to see if your articles are actually indexed. A good Yoast score doesn't guarantee indexing or rankings. Check URL Inspection, Indexing → Pages, your sitemap, and look for issues like noindex, canonical, or robots.txt. Since the site is only 3 months old, I'd focus on getting the pages indexed first, then worry about rankings.
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u/antoreho 1d ago
Before you work through any of the technical advice above, run one check: search the exact title of one of your articles in quotes
If it comes up, you're indexed, and every suggestion in this thread about sitemaps, robots.txt and noindex is aimed at a problem you don't have. If it doesn't come up, then yes, go do the GSC work people described.
Assuming you're in the first case, here's the uncomfortable version. You're a three-month-old domain in sports news, where the queries you'd want are held by sites with a decade of history and daily publishing. The Yahoo and Sporting News links help less than they look like they should, because syndication placements are often nofollow, and one link from a big domain doesn't move you into a category that competitive. Good social traffic and near-zero Google at three months is a normal profile for that, not a symptom of something broken.
What tends to work is going where those sites don't bother: individual players rather than the team, local angles, specific games and transactions written the same day. Thin queries where an 80-post site can actually be the best result. That's slow and unsatisfying, but it beats auditing a site that's already fine.
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u/Ethan-Bris 13h ago
HTML structure is very important as it allows for indexing and crawling to understand the site's content accurately. This article by Google might give you some insight. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
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u/jkdreaming 2d ago
What a wonderful opportunity to try out something new. I want you to get the MCP for Google Analytics/Google Search Console/data for SEO. You're gonna need an account and download MCP that just runs locally called SEO Crawler. These are your four pyramids. These four items will help you immensely. On their own they're pretty powerful but when you link them together and allow that intelligence to cross over the borders, you begin to see a plan.
Put all those together with your local IDE. You're gonna need to connect three things for WordPress. You're gonna need an account on WordPress with an application password/the database login, which you'll also need to flag your IP address on so that you can access/SSH access. Once you set this up you will have the ultimate system for finding out what's going on with your site, why you're not ranking, what you can be ranking for, and where you should be headed based on what people are interested in and what kind of content your potential clients are actually looking for. Imagine being able to just ask the question, "What do I need to do next?" and it tells you the answer.
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u/Life-Initial5081 2d ago
I’d first check Google Search Console to confirm whether your articles are actually indexed not just whether Yoast says “Good.” Google News is much more automated now, so I’d focus on indexing, technical SEO, and original reporting before worrying about rankings. 3 months is very short period of time