This is a question many webmasters ask themselves. It’s discouraging (to say the least) when you invest countless hours of hard work into building and promoting your website, only to discover that it’s not ranking in Google for your target keyword. Common sense should tell you that you won’t receive many visitors without a strong organic ranking. So, why isn’t your site ranking in Google and how can you fix it?
It’s Still New
One possible reason why your website isn’t ranking in Google is because it’s still relatively new. It takes time for search engines to discover new websites, and once they find them, it will take even longer for search engines to decide where to rank them. Search engine optimization (SEO) doesn’t deliver instant results, nor should you expect it to. In the meantime, be patient and continue building and promoting your site like you normally would.
Blocked Robots
Have you checked your site’s robots.txt file to ensure search engines can properly crawl it? Using a file-transfer protocol (FTP) program like CuteFTP or FileZilla, log into your server and open the text file named robots.txt. If you notice a line of code containing “Disallow: /,” this means search engines are prohibited from accessing your site and pages within. Delete this code to gran them access and encourage a higher level of search engine visibility.
It’s Banned
Yes, Google has been known to ban certain websites that violate its Webmaster Guidelines. While usually reserved for extreme offenders, bans do happen. I know what you’re probably thinking: I haven’t done anything wrong, so how can I be banned? Even if you didn’t violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, the owner of the domain before you may have. In this case, it’s best to submit a reconsideration request to Google, explaining your situation to them.
Lack of Backlinks
Google uses hundreds of different signals to determine a website’s ranking, but nothing holds more value than backlinks. Without backlinks pointing to your site, Google will have a difficult time finding it and even more difficult time ranking it. Once your site goes live, post updates on your social media networking accounts to encourage search engines to crawl it.
Irrelevant Target Keyword
Just because you “want” your website to rank for a particular keyword doesn’t necessarily mean that it should. If your website is about dog training, for instance, it’s probably not going to rank for keywords associated with cats. I know that’s kind of obvious, but your content must match the keyword for which you are trying to rank.
