Indexing issue or just time?

[ttb]

Hey guys,

When I publish a post on our blog, I notice that it barely shows up in SERPs even if I copy and paste the title verbatim into Google. All my settings in Yoast are correct from what I've seen.

Is this just Google slowly getting around to crawling our site? Or is something else wrong here? We recently shut down and relaunched our site about 3 weeks ago.

Here is the site URL: The Tech Block

[CleverPhD]

If you shut down and relaunched your site 3 weeks ago and lets say you also changed your URL structure and title tags and if you also do not have 301 redirects for old to new content and you don't have a sitemap.

All those things, even if you did them all "correctly" can cause Google to take a while to respider an reindex your pages.  Google ranks "pages" vs "sites" generally speaking and so that can impact rankings.

Looks like you canonical all the pages to themselves? Example

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://thetechblock.com/the-ios-interface-concept](view-source:http://thetechblock.com/the-ios-interface-concept)" /> 

Were you  www.thetechblock.com before and now you are trying to change to the non www?  If you did change to non www then Google would see this as a new site and so the rankings would start over

If you want to look at crawl rate, you should be able to go into Google Webmaster Tools and see how often they are spidering.  Similarly, you can submit a sitemap and see how many are indexed

I

[StevenvanVessum]

Hi Abdel,

As CleverPhD already pointed out: shutting down and relaunched (with a changed information architecture) can search engines to take a while until they're up to speed with indexing your website again. It will take some time, and quite some content and links to speed up that process. In the meantime you can of course help the search engines by:

• Having a HTML sitemap
• Having a XML sitemap (be sure to link the XML sitemap in the HTML sitemap, add the XML sitemap to the robots.txt and submit the XML sitemap and RSS feed in Google Webmaster Tools)
• Having proper canonical tagging and 301-redirects (if possible)

It's important to get crawled, but it also important to let the search engines crawl the right pages. Why are you linking to those tag pages in the bottom right of your website? Perhaps it's better to create category pages for that (better URL structure).

Good luck and keep us posted!

[ttb]

Even with new posts? I can understand old post taking a while to crawl, but new posts too? If I write something, and post it, I'll check hours later and Google hasn't indexed it. Is this normal?

[StevenvanVessum]

Yes, even with new posts. How are the search engines supposed to find it?

If you don't have the measures I stated in place it will take them longer to find and index the content. The way it's now you want the search engines to find the content (new and old). When having the sitemaps and proper canonicals you're handing it to them.

Good luck!

[ttb]

Steven,

Thanks for your help. What is the proper way to set up canonicals?

[StevenvanVessum]

I would recommend reading the Google Help section on this. It's quite complete: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&hlrm=nl&answer=139394.

[ttb]

Actually Steven. I just looked at my source code and I see the canonicals.

http://d.pr/i/QFq0

We also have sitemaps too that are being indexed by Google and I can track that in Webmaster. I guess it's just a matter of time?

[StevenvanVessum]

Yep, I also spotted them. And are all the canonical tags point to the right pages?

If all is in place and is configured correctly, it should be a matter of time yes. I would however try to speed up the process by doing some linkbuilding, for instance using social media.