My website cant be found on google

Using Ghost
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So, last summer last year I created my own website https://einmaligefilmecke.de/ with ghost. The major problem I have now with it, is that the individual subpages (i.e the film-reviews) cant be found on google and I really dont know why what to do now. For every post I added tags, excerpts and also the google meta-datas, like meta-title, meta-description and also canonical-URL and on top I added the URL to the meta-description. Did I forget something? What did I do wrong?

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TL;DR: NEVER set a post’s canonical URL to itself unless you want it to disappear.

When a page doesn’t appear in Google, the first question I always ask is: What do you see in Google Search Console? So… what do you see in Google Search Console? Are the pages discovered? crawled? indexed? You’re going to need to share some details on the status of the pages that are perhaps missing…

OH. Hang on. You set the canonical URL. That is probably 100% your problem. (But you should really still go look in GSC, because it’s good practice for solving future search problems.)

Generically, canonical URLs are used to tell a visiting search engine which copy of duplicate content is the “canonical” one. Only that canonical version gets indexed and returned in search results, ever. (Well, unless Google decides a different page is a better choice for the canonical url. Sometimes it’ll decide to ignore you.)

By default, Ghost returns a canonical URL of the page’s own url and includes the page in the sitemap-posts.xml, which search engines use, UNLESS you set the canonical URL.

Here’s where it gets hairy: Ghost interprets any post for which you have set a canonical URL of any sort as meaning that that post is NOT the canonical version, and as a result, it does not include that post in the sitemap.

This makes a lot of sense if a page is not the canonical version. And no sense if you set the post’s canonical url to itself. So, you should go back through your posts and REMOVE the canonical url you set for each post, unless it is set to somewhere other than the post itself. And then you should go into GSC and resubmit your sitemaps, request re-crawling, etc.

That’ll probably fix it, but not instantaneously. Meanwhile, check in GSC for any other problems, too, so that you can hopefully solve problems in parallel instead of one at a time.

1 Like
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and

I’m confused here. What do you mean by saying “never set post’s canonical URL to itself” while this is the default behavior of Ghost itself?

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If you fill in that field in the metadata section, ghost will not include the post in the sitemap.

In other words, if you want the default behavior, don’t fill in the canonical url field, because you’ll prevent the default behavior, and get unwanted behavior instead.

2 Likes
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Thank you for the answers. First of all, I have removed the canonnical URL and now, I am waiting for the subpages to be crawled again. I hope that helps

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I hope that’ll fix you up. You can also ask Google to re-index, and resubmit the sitemap, if you haven’t already.

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Well, I did everything of that, also I asked to re-index etc. But I also found out that my website can be found on edge and other browsers. It only cant be found on google - so its a google-specific problem, and I dont know why. Is that a known problem or not?

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I get lots of traffic from Google, so I don’t think this is a general problem that impacts everyone.

What do you see in GSC? Are your pages indexed?

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Yes, they are indexed, they should be found - but it doesnt work on google, just the other websites

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You said this was browser-dependent, but I think you’re muddling up search engines and browsers. (And since different browsers might use different search engines, I can see how that could happen.)

If Google Search Console shows that your pages are indexed, then they’re available as search results in Google search. That doesn’t in any way guarantee that they’ll be /high ranking/ search results, so you might not see them.

If I search for my site name, my Ghost site is the first hit: Google Search

But if I search for “Ghost developer theme customization” Google Search - I’m not anywhere on the first page. There’s nothing wrong with my site, but it’s hard to rank a bunch of pretty generic words. (And a ‘ghost developer’ doesn’t mean someone who works on Ghost, on most sites, so that doesn’t help.)

Every search engine (not browser) uses a different algorithm, so it’s not unusual to get different results in different browsers.

Free SEO advice (worth everything you paid for it):

  • Write interesting, useful, and unique content
  • Share it in non-spammy ways in appropriate places.
  • Use descriptive titles, custom excerpts, and tags. Those show up in the page’s metadata, and that helps search engines understand the page.
  • Use descriptive headings for any content beyond a few paragraphs
  • Remember that paywalled content is invisible to search engines. Make sure you have ‘enough’ publicly visible content, either by having some free content, or using the public preview card.
  • Keep publishing. More content is better, and search rank is slow to grow.