(2019-6-9) I’m writing like a madman over at complainingaboutfood.wordpress.com but getting almost no traffic.
A search of “site:complainingaboutfood.wordpress.com” reveals only 3 pages are indexed in Google, and 85 in Bing.
At this time, I have 84 pages and posts, plus the additional pages for categories and tags.
This was reflected in the traffic, which was minimal – maybe 1 to 2 search views per day – mainly for a single article that doesn’t even seem to be in the Google index.
I would get maybe 7 views, max per day, from the WordPress Reader, and I suspect most were SEOs. I’d get a lot of “likes” without any views.
Google’s search results, above, didn’t show that single page. That is so odd.
I added the website to the Google Search Console.
Now I just need to wait a few weeks for Google to index the site more completely.
After that, the search ranking seems to take around 3 months to bear fruit, at least the way I wrote this content, which was without much keyword research. (The single article getting traffic was an exception – I did keyword research on that.)
I hope Google will anoint the site with the declaration that “this site is edited by a human being”, because it’s a real site with real original content. Maybe the content isn’t authoritative, but it’s real, and it’s also, I hope, not a bunch of junk.
Overall, I’m pretty disappointed in Google right now. They aren’t indexing real blogging – this isn’t “SEO” content yet. Perhaps it’s because the blog’s in a category that’s overrun with SEO and marketing.
Update for August 12, 2019
Search “site:complainingaboutfood.wordpress.com” results. 8 on Google, 133 on Bing.
Google Search Console reports 76 valid pages. So it must be indexing them, but keeping them out of SERPs. I wonder why?
Search Console also reports 113 excluded pages. I don’t see a pattern here.
It looks like the permalink structure changed. I’m not sure if I did it, or wordpress.com did it. (I can’t find the setting in the Dashboard!) So they could show up as duplicate pages. They don’t show up as “Duplicate Content” in the Search Console, though. This is confusing.
Today, I removed all the categories. I was suspecting that category pages were being considered “duplicate pages”. I kept the tags, because tags are useful for getting some traffic via the wordpress.com search engine.