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my blog is 6 months old, with frequently updated content. Yet, not a single page is indexed by Google. Why is that so? isn't wordpress set up for SEO by default?

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3 Answers

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Actually your site is indexed all 176 pages. It would probably help your search results if you changed your permalink structure to something other than default.

You should also get a yourself a Google Webmaster Tools account so you can see how your site gets indexed and crawled.

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I have to ask the obvious here; have you changed your privacy settings to allow the blog to be accessible by search engines. Blogs in general and WordPress blogs are typically well crawled by Google and the other search engines. If you have already made the blog visible, you may want to create a sitemap and submit it to the search engines. You can use the plugin Google XML Sitemap to create the sitemap with almost no configuration. The plugin is available here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/. Hope this helps.

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+1 for sitemap generator. Awesome plugin. Within 6 months of using it, my site was fully indexed and being crawled by Google. Though, my keyword strength was not strong. :-/ – Zack Mar 2 '11 at 18:11
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Check under Settings/Privacy. Is the site marked as private by accident? It's happened to me. I'd also suggest installing the Google XML sitemaps plugin which will update your sitemap as well as ping relevant services when content is updated.

It's probably also worth checking your robots.txt file to see if you're excluding the whole site for some reason.

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thanks guys. i did install an SEO plugin a week or so back. Could it have been because of that that my blog is now indexed suddenly? Besides, I want to understand how wordpress is structured in the first place with regard to search engine friendliness. Isn't it set up for SEO by default? Is the SEO plugin necessary then? and to what extent does post name in the url make a difference as against the standard numerical format of wordpress urls? – user3641 Mar 3 '11 at 3:22
By default does give you a bunch of help with SEO friendliness but it also comes down to the theme you're using. Does it wrap you post title in h1 and your site title in h2 when on posts? Does it provide proper titles on the page? Really SEO is SEO WordPress just makes it easy to write a theme that search engines want to see. – curtismchale Mar 3 '11 at 16:12

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