Problem

The disaster is that my sub blogs never got indexed by Google even though my main blog SEO Web Design with Binh Nguyen was at PageRank 4.

I started making 4 sub domains a while back in June 2008. Those are:

1. seo.binh.name – Search Engine Optimzation
2. wp.binh.name – WordPress Resources
3. webdesign.binh.name – Web Design
4. cntt.binh.name – CNTT (IT)

Until now, I didn’t see any pages from those blogs on Google search result page, even though they are on Yahoo! search. I thought that my domain got problem, either sandboxed by Google, or something worse.

Solution

Recently, thanks to Andy Beard.eu for notifying me on My Sub-Domains Not Indexed, that my new blogs were having the following meta tag:

name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’

So I started to have a feeling that something was wrong in the blog settings. I tried to view my blogs to see what is going on.

Today when I finally able to get onto my blog, I found out the problem.I set my blog privacy to block search engines!!!

Here is what I saw on my blog settings:

Privacy Settings

Blog Visibility

(_) I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers and in public listings around this site.

(o) I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

So that’s the story, I enabled the first option to allow search engines to crawl my blogs. Hopefully in few more days those blogs will become available for searching.

I hope that you won’t make the same mistake as I did. But if you do, feel free to share it here with me

My excuse

No, I’m not that dump as you have been thinking while reading my article.  I turned the privacy on because I didn’t want to mess up the search engine while adding and modifying the static pages and site structure. What I really didn’t take care of was to disable it after those blogs are published.

The lesson learned

If you want to get your site indexed, remember to check

• the robots.txt file for disallow,
• the robots meta tag for noindex,
• the privacy setting of your blog.

• SEO Web Design: #5
• SEO Web Designer: #23
• Binh: #1
• Binh Nguyen: #5

SEO Web Design:

SEO Web Designer:

binh:

binh nguyen:

The good news doesn’t stay through though. I checked later on and everytime I see binh.name move down the ranking a little bit. At the time of writing this post the positions are as follow:

• SEO Web Design: #17
• SEO Web Designer: #25
• Binh: #1
• Binh Nguyen: #3

I can notice that the ranking of each keyword influence the other keywords. In this case, when Binh Nguyen move up from #5 to #3 I see a huge drop of SEO Web Design from #5 to #17. Maybe it’s Google’s placement changes in real time when it detect new links to the competitors.