Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, a cautionary tale about a website hand-off that missed a critically important step, and a free tool you can use to check your own website.

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💡 The case of the invisible website

Recently I received a question from a nonprofit communications manager at a small org where a volunteer had put together a new website.

It had been a few months since the new website went live, and the comms manager had noticed that Google seemed to be ignoring the site entirely.

No sign of the fancy new website in the search results.

In a situation like this, there's an easy first step in the diagnosis: did the developer inadvertently tell Google to skip over the site?

It's not uncommon when developing a new website to add what's called a noindex tag in the header code across the whole site. This is an instruction to Google (and other bots that index the web) that the site shouldn't be included in search results. (This applies to AI tools as well.)

This keeps the site publicly accessible, but prevents it from being indexed and show in search results before launch time.

This isn't the best way to solve this problem! A website-in-development should be gated behind a password ... but I digress.

How to check whether your website can be indexed:

If you're concerned about the "indexability" of your website — whether it might be blocking indexing in a way you can't see — here's a simple tool you can use (for free) to find out.

Type your website homepage URL into this tool:

​https://www.indexernow.com/tools/indexability-checker​

You'll get a quick report, and hopefully all the checks have checkmarks next to them, like this:

The tool checks for the presence of a noindex tag (both in the page source and at the server level), and runs several other checks for variables that could potential stop Google and other crawlers from indexing your site.

If you're running into an issue with your website seeming invisible in Google and other search results, start your diagnosis here.

In the case of this volunteer-built invisible website, we removed the noindex tag, set up a Google Search Console property, and submitted the sitemap and homepage URL.

It still took a week or two, but before long we started seeing the new site show up in searches for the organization's name!

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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