Search engine submission - Urgent

[seoman10]

Is it necessary to submit a new site to search engines?

I have a brand-new site I purchased a few days ago which I didn't think to check until after I purchased it, But it has not been indexed by Google!
The domain was registered three months ago, and probably the website wouldn't have been designed until after that.
But I'm still left puzzling why the site is not indexed by Google.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Who's the patient?

Is it actually not indexed or not ranking on first page? Is there any content? Any SEO done? what about accessibility by bots? have you checked robots.txt? Any meta robots tags?

[seoman10]

It is not indexed at all. I have tried the info: and site: parameter

As far as I can tell it is accessible.  But have just found there is no robots.txt! Dose is mater?

[DmitriiK]

what's patients name? or is it a secret?

As for robots.txt - typically not having any wouldn't prevent bots from accessing a site, but who knows.

P.S. please, answer all questions asked - content? seo? any messages in google search console (previously known as Google Webmaster Tools)?

[seoman10]

The site is great-headphones [dot] c o m

It is an Amazon affiliate store, nothing in the way of blog yet just products.

I haven't added it to my google search console account yet, just in case it is dodgy, I don't want Google penalising the rest of my sites as well.

[DirkC]

It's a very thin affiliate site with 0% original content (all content = Amazon). On top of that - its quite heavy to load, has no optimisation whatsoever (H1/Meta/..etc); several elements on page that return 404 status, low pagespeed scores and as it is new, no incoming links.

You could check the logs - it's quite possible that Googlebot hasn't discovered the site yet. If it has visited, it probably considered the site too low quality to index. If not visited, you could register in Search Console and do a "fetch like Google".
It will probably put some pages in the index - but there is no chance that with the current content this site is going to rank.

Dirk

[DirkC]

The site did exist before - check https://web.archive.org/web/20141117163048/http://www.(your domain)/ - so quite possible it had a manual action (if the type of content was as low quality then as it is now) erasing it from the index.

[seoman10]

I know it's stupid but I didn't think to check for a Google penalty before I brought it, normally I wouldn't even look at a domain that wasn't indexed.

I brought it with the idea of beefing it up a lot, I realised I would have to do all the SEO stuff, but if it's had a penalty it is debatable whether I even bother with it.

Is it worthwhile putting a bit into it and seeing whether indexes or not?
It's not the end of the world I got it for a snip, it may be better to curb the losses and put it into a site that is clean.

[DirkC]

A penalty is not irreversible - but with the effort you will have to put into it you might as well start on a new domain from scratch. This is what I personally would do. It's not that the domain is so powerful by itself - an exact match domain might give you a small advantage but on the other hand you will have to put much more effort to re-build the site reputation.

To be 100% sure - check the search console of the site -  using a "new" Google account not related to your current one; if you want to be extremely careful - do it on some external network - not on your own network.

Dirk

[solvid]

I would agree with Dirk. There is not much to rank for on your website, all of your content comes from amazon.

Still, another questions is why is it not indexed yet. The website is built on Wordpress and if you haven't touched your robots.txt then it should not block crawlers. As I can see you are not ranking for your exact match domain name (i.e. site: yourdomain.com) which can be sign of a manual penalty.

What I would suggest is to add some content, do some internal optimisation (download seo Yoast plugin), add Titles, H1, optimise images and so forth. Then, create a separate search console account and submit your sitemap and see if it works.