I was searching for my own blog article to find something I had written about as a reference, and discovered my web pages weren't coming up correctly in a google search.
The article still came up, in the number 3 position, but it came up to the main blog title page, not the specific article I wanted. So I checked another one, and it was doing the same thing.
I called Hubspot Support, like I do when things are broken, and they sent me links to videos and several help articles on my website. Getting started for beginners on google search console, There is also this article on managing your site maps here.
The good thing about setting up Google Search Console and indexing your site map, is it will alert you if someone tries to hack your website, or if you have any errors on your site that google detects which adversely affect your search rankings.
I did some research and found out google started using google search console in 2015, but I missed it somehow between flying all over the country for my daughter's volleyball and making sure my son graduated with high honors. You know, that thing called life.
Google Search Console and registering your site map are two things that everyone who manages a website has to do now. Most of my 400 pages were still coming up, but about 60 of them were not.
It really only took me three quick calls to get this working.
I was able to set up an account with Google for search console in seconds on my own, no problem.
Then I followed the instructions, and generated some code specific to my website to verify it by calling my domain name service provider, netfirms, to make sure I was posting the right code in the right place. I wasn't, so I'm glad I called.
Once I fixed it, they told me to give it four hours to propagate to the routers all over the world, so I clicked "verify later." Woke up and checked it this morning, and it said verified.
Next, I called hubspot back to see if there was anything else I needed to do, because I was getting a sitemap error message in red, "unfetchable" on site maps.
They told me to put in http://www.bayareainbound.com/sitemap.xml on the tab called "sitemap" on google console. It didn't work. We hung up with them promising to do research and get back to me.
After I hung up, I realized that my old URL redirects to a secure version of my website aka https://www.bayareainbound.com/sitemap.xml. So, I added that one too, and it said I had success in green on both of them.
So t
ha
t wasn't too bad, three calls, two to hubspot, and one to my DNS service provider, and some networking and SEO knowledge of my own, and I'm up and running again. Crisis averted.
Hope this helped you, if you are having the same problem, feel free to read the articles on the links above and call your service providers to be safe.
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Laurie is Principal at BAI Marketing, a digital marketing consulting firm, that specializes in increasing revenue for tech companies quickly. Contact Laurie@bayareainbound.com
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