TLDR; By early stuffing around with DrLingua.com, I borked Google and Bing…
Google and Bing are taking a long time (well, it seems like along time) to show any results from my site in search. Both engines list DrLingua.com as indexed, but no results show with a site:drlingua.com search. I figure there’s one of two likely possibilities.
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I stuffed it up. I did the site first as http on the local server, then moved it to https, then changed all the URLs (took out a ’#’ fragment identifier from Reacts hash router). I think the search engines are likely going (WTF?!#) and waiting a week or so for things to settle down.
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I noticed the domain name has been previously registered. It may have been someone who use black hat SEO. That would be pretty crappy to clean up, but I don’t think that’s the case. There were no backlinks when I started it, and neither Google nor Bing’s webmaster tools are giving me any warnings.
Somehow I don’t think that calling Google would help. Even though we were hanging out today with another family and the dad is a Googler… At the moment it’s no problem. As long as the content has been indexed it’s unlikely that someone else will be able to steal the content, and I’m happy to wait for it to be available in the search engines for a week or so. It’s just that it a bit annoying having no idea why it’s delayed, and not being able to do anything about it.
One of the problems is I’m getting a hundred or so visits a day from China. I hope this is people using the Kana game, if so, great! But I’m dubious.
Google Analytics shows the results coming from search. But I’m not in Google, Bing, or Baidu (I checked), I’m assuming the results aren’t from a search engine and it’s either some sort of a scam, or some weird GA spoofing that I don’t understand. I’m guessing it the Baidu spider, but I just don’t have the data to go on yet. Maybe once my site is properly returning in results I’ll get a better idea… Maybe…
Addendum 1: I just noticed Google Analytics now has an “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” flag. Well, guess that will sort out whether it’s the Baidu spider. ¯\(ツ)/¯ (It’s been a while since I GA’d)
Addendum 2: Looks like it’s not spiders or bots, just a fair few people playing the games in China. Nice!
Addendum 3: The site is now live on Bing! I resubmitted the sitemap. It had been sitting there for over a week as pending. I resubmitted the sitemap last night, and it’s live today. I know that correlation is not causation, but…
It’s a different thing for Google though – Google search console shows results are indexed (they have been for a week), but a search for site:drlingua.com gives me no results. Still a wait and see thing. I may drill my Google friend with a few questions over dinner next week – even though he works in maps and has nothing to do with search…