Yesterday, I blogged about the smart thinking of Melanie Oudin’s family, which registered MelanieOudin.com a couple of years ago. With Melanie competing in the quarter finals of the US Open tennis tournament, she is winning over new fans and becoming a highly searched topic. Her website is operational and is run on WordPress, which Google and other search engines generally love – as blogs typically lead to fresh content.
I was surprised to see that MelanieOudin.com did not rank in the top 100 Google results on a “Melanie Oudin” search. Almost without fail, Google will rank the developed keyword .com domain name fairly well on a search for the exact keyword phrase. I then checked to see if the website was even listed in Google at all by searching for MelanieOudin.com directly. It was then that I found the culprit for its omission from the top 100 results – the site isn’t indexed in Google.
Whether the site isn’t ranking because it’s new (not sure) or whether Google penalized it for some reason, now would be the best time for it to be listed among the results, as “Melanie Oudin” is one of the top searches right now on Google, Yahoo, Twitter…etc. If the site was indexed, it would almost certainly receive more traffic, which could lead to bigger things such as endorsement deals and sponsorships.
There is something Melanie Oudin’s family can do to ensure the website is indexed in Google. In fact, I recommend that all website owners do an exact search for their domain name, and if it’s not listed among the results, they should think about filing a Google Reconsideration Request (requires a free Google account). This will tell Google that you have a legitimate website, and that Google should reconsider listing it. Since Google generally lists all websites they can find (based on links to it which do exist), they frequently have a reason for omitting a website.
Requesting reconsideration can get your website indexed in Google quickly, and it’s a smart thing to do, especially when there are a lot of people searching for you or your keywords.
@Elliot
It looks like the domain just showed up online very recently because google and yahoo have nothing cached for it.
Since your site is a trusted site, the back links you’ve given the domain will get it ranked now, hopefully before the Open is over! The domain will likely beat the sandbox, but we’ll see.
Your site ranks #1 for melanieoudin.com news in google right now, funny enough. You sneaky devil!
😉
@ Richard
I thought that was the case, but there are a couple other tennis sites that had previously linked to it.
I hope her site gets indexed ASAP.
@Elliot
Just wanted to add that we’ve found that the fastest way to get a new site indexed is to create an .xml or xml.gz sitemap and send it to google, yahoo and bing.
Google will come back many times a day to check the sitemap for changes and the others will check back whenever their mice get on the wheels!
There’s plenty of scripts and plugins that create sitemaps and auto-ping for you, just google around for the info.
– Richard
@Elliot
Yeah I see a link from attennis.com but if I was google, I’d ignore that site, looks spammy.
Your site on the other hand is trusted news site!
I wonder why wikipedia lists http://www.MelanieOudin.net as her official web site?
If you’re sure you haven’t been “naughty” with your site, you should register it with Google Webmaster Tools as a step to getting the domain indexed. Filing a reconsideration request is absolutely the last thing you do when all other avenues to get a site indexed have been exhausted.
Her blog will probably never be indexed, there is a glitch in the most recent wordpress update that auto-selects the option to ” I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” in the privacy section of the wordpress admin.
They wouldn’t know it unless you actually went to that page.
It looks like the site recently had the following robots meta tag on the homepage:
This would have prevented the site from getting indexed (but it looks ok now) and might have been from a privacy setting somewhere.
At any rate, in general these issues are not so black/white that it makes sense to rely on submitting a reconsideration request :-). When all else fails, I’d recommend posting in the Google Webmaster Help forum to get some expert opinions.
@Dan
Thanks for the tip – my WP 2.8.4 installations have the same issue, as it turns out. I would probably never have seen this, I didn’t even know such a setting existed!
Elliot –
We have the same issue with SouthDakota.com right now. No idea and can not get a response, but for the terms “south dakota” and “southdakota” we are not in the results. We were listed at 1 time, #26ish on Google. The site is indexed and we do get search traffic just not on these 2 keywords. Very frustrating to not be listed anywhere. We have submitted the request but no response as of yet – over 2 weeks now. We do have a bundle of pages indexed though.
Anyone cure this, let me know. Thanks.
Results 1 – 10 of about 35,100 from http://www.southdakota.com for southdakota.com
Great post Elliot. Had a domain name that got killed in the last Panda Update and didn’t or couldn’t find the reconsideration tool. Hopefully they’ll bring back my site. I went from 300,000 visitors per year to 9000. Regards
Elliot,
Another tip to share. One of the fastest ways to get a page indexed that I’ve found lately is to simply give it a +1. I haven’t tried this Google Extension yet, but for those using Chrome, this may be a good way to index any site:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/31/google-plus-one-chrome-extension/
John