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I'm fairly new to websites, earlier this year I started with a static website just submitting .html files to learn seo well. Eventually, I decided to get into wordpress and start fresh with the same domain.

I removed all my URLs from google search console but forgot to change the robots.txt and the sitemap. So basically the google crawler kept checking for URLs that doesn't exist. This went along for about 2 or 3 weeks till the wordpress site was ready and I found out about it and saw many 404 errors. I marked all as fixed and

-----I changed the robots.txt to this.-----

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.exampleDomain.com/post-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.exampleDomain.com/page-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.exampleDomain.com/category-sitemap.xml

-----and my sitemap to this.-----

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="//www.exampleDomain.com/main-sitemap.xsl"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <sitemap>
        <loc>http://exampleDomain.com/post-sitemap.xml</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-11-24T02:25:35+02:00</lastmod>
    </sitemap>
    <sitemap>
        <loc>http://exampleDomain.com/page-sitemap.xml</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-11-22T02:42:54+02:00</lastmod>
    </sitemap>
    <sitemap>
        <loc>http://exampleDomain.com/category-sitemap.xml</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-11-24T02:25:35+02:00</lastmod>
    </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

I thought it could be the .htaccess but when I took a look at it. It was populated already by W3 Cache plugin. So it can't be that.

Just to note the new sitemap is reading properly as well as the robots.txt on Google console.

There hasn't been any virus attacks plus the domain is mine from the beginning.

This all happened when I removed all URLs and tried to resubmit the fresh website with the same domain. I don't understand why am I not being indexed already? It been about two days.

Could it be that I need to wait a while like at the beginning when I first submitted to Google search? It takes a good few days, if I'm not mistaken or is it something else.

Stephen Ostermiller
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Rivash Harripersad
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  • You can't delete a website and start over and expect to get good rankings. If you change your website you should implement 301 redirects from your old pages to your new ones. If you don't do that, Google will lose all trust in your site for quite a while. It could take years for your rankings to recover. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 25 '17 at 11:02
  • Sitemaps have almost nothing to do with rankings. Google can crawl WordPress sites fine without them. Sitemaps just don't help. See The Sitemap Paradox The best thing about sitemaps is that they give you extra stats about your site in Google Search Console. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 25 '17 at 11:03
  • You say it has been two days, but big changes take weeks or months for search engines to fully process. Part of this is just waiting, but it will go lots faster if you do the redirects from your old site. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 25 '17 at 11:04
  • Hi, thank you. Right now I'm not really interested in rankings, just want to be found on google search. It finally says indexed from the sitemap on google console (took 3 days). I guess this is a step in the right direction? – Rivash Harripersad Nov 26 '17 at 00:11
  • Redirects also help with indexing. Google will only index a few pages from new sites. If you redirect everything you keep your old site's reputation and Google will index many more pages from your current site. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 26 '17 at 00:17

0 Answers0