Q and A: Why doesn't Google index our site?

Dear Kalena...

Help! My site seems to be not indexed by Google.. at all! I searched for
my domain using "site:mysite.com" and nothing is returned. Can
you tell me why it (apparently) hasn't been indexed? The site has been up
for several months.

Thanks,
John

Kalena's Answer:

Dear John

I've checked and you're right! Google has not cached your site and doesn't appear to have any pages indexed. Generally, this kind of problem is caused by IP or server issues. On the other hand, Yahoo appears to have no problem indexing your site.

However, when I try to ping the site's IP address, I do get a "request timed out" error. The IP does not register as valid, yet the site is visible. It may be that the site is on a shared IP with known issues to Google. For example, Google may have banned another site sharing the same IP as yours while Yahoo hasn't. I suggest you contact your site host, explain the problem and ask them to put your site on a dedicated IP. There shouldn't be a charge for this but some hosts have a different viewpoint.

I would also ask you site host or web designer to check the .htaccess and robots.txt files to make sure entries in those files aren't accidently blocking Googlebot or preventing Google from caching your site. It also wouldn't hurt to add a Robots Tag to your HTML code including the "index, follow" command, although this is not necessary if you have a robots.txt file in place.

Let us know how you get on.