How To Fix Indexing Issues
If your website or webpage isnt indexed, the first step is to figure out why. You cant hope to fix the issue unless you understand what went wrong.
To do that, paste the URL into Googles URL Inspection tool and check the coverage error.
Here are a few common issues in Search Console and what they mean:
- Excluded by noindex tag. Google is blocked from indexing the page because of a noindex robots meta tag. Remove this from the page if it should be indexed.
- Blocked by robots.txt. Google cant crawl the page because its blocked in robots.txt. Remove the block if it should be indexed.
- Page with redirect. Google wont index redirected pages, so remove the redirect if the page shouldnt be redirected.
- Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google believes this page is duplicate content and has chosen to index what it believes to be the canonical instead. Usually, this isnt an issue, but you should investigate further if you believe the page should be indexed.
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S For Setting Up A Website
We can break down the website creation process into the following steps:
Obviously, each of the above points can be built on much more. We have a ebook where you can get more information.
Setting Up Hosting On Mac
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Register Your Domain Name
Your domain name is not only the address of your website but will also function as the second part of your email address. For these reasons, its important to think carefully about this and register the right domain name.
Check if your preferred domain name is still available by typing it in the domain name search bar. If its already taken, we will provide you with some great alternatives.
Think about the extension you would like to use. If your website is focused on people in your country, its a good idea to pick the ccTLD, like .co.uk for the United Kingdom. However, if youre looking to reach a bigger audience and receive international traffic, you might want to choose a .com extension.
Choose A Hosting Plan
The first step of creating a website is choosing a hosting plan. Without hosting, your website can not go live.
Our hosting plans include everything you need to create your own website. Besides our Website Builder, our plans include email, PHP databases, DNS features and more. We offer five different plans, which are adjusted to your needs. From the Beginner plan, for simple and personal websites, to Guru, for advanced users and more complex websites.
We believe the performance of your website is of great importance. Thats why we made sure our web hosting is fast and reliable, and our servers secure. Choose the plan that best meets your needs. Check the details of our plans to see what they feature.
Regardless of the plan you choose, youre always assured of the best performances and reliable servers. If youre not sure what plan to choose, dont worry you can always upgrade to a bigger plan later.
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Build Your First Google Sites Website
Ready to build your first site? Just go to to start building a new website. That’ll drop you directly into the site editor.
Now it’s time to build your site. We’ll try re-creating part of Zapier’s About page in Google Sites as an exampleyou can follow along, or start building your own site.
Tip: Google Sites’ new editor only works in Google Chrome and Firefox, so you can’t edit a site in Safari or Microsoft Edge right now.
What Elements Do Good Websites Have In Common
1. Great-looking artwork
The logo and image selection are crucial to getting a professional-looking website. Today you can easily find loads of free stock photos: the best is to check out Creative Commons.
Whats more, you can find more professional-looking photos on a lot of other websites, like Adobe Stock andShutterstock. Here are some great free photo options.
It is important to make sure you understand the available image formats: .gif, .jpg and .png are the main formats. Plus, you have to optimize the size and quality of the image to the web standard browser. Everything you need to know about this topic can be found here.
Of course, you can always use sites like TinyPNG orShortPixel to compress your photos for free.
Likewise, it will come in handy to have an editing program to be able to edit and change the size of the images. A professional and free option is Gimp, however, its quite complicated to use. Another Photoshop alternative is Affinity Photo, which costs only a fraction of the price of the original and doesnt require a subscription.
But there are increasingly more tools you can use to create graphic resources simply and without having to learn to use Photoshop or Illustrator. For instance, you can use Stencil orSnappa.
2. Professional copy
- using a headline structure that makes sense,
- not letting the text paragraphs get too long,
- adding bullet points and
Weve actually written an entire guide around this topic, which you can find here.
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What Do I Mean By Platform
Well, back in 2005 when I got started with web development, most sites were created using HTML , CSS, and PHP. Each of these took a lot of time to learn and were difficult to master.
Thats why most people still think setting up a website from scratch is difficult or requires a lot of coding and design skills but thats no longer true.
In 2021, content management systems like WordPress have made creating a website accessible to everyone.
To put it simply, a CMS is a user-friendly platform for building websites and managing your own online content, instead of creating a website from scratch using HTML, PHP, and other coding languages.
Pick And Adjust A Template
After you have completed your order, you can get started on building your website. Our professional designers have developed many beautiful templates, so you dont have to begin with a blank page.
You can choose from over 140 templates, which are divided into several categories. This makes it easier for you to find a template that suits the topic of your website.
The template defines the overall appearance of your website, which makes it an important step of creating a website. Our templates are easy to customise, so you can design your site the way you want. You can always switch templates if youre not satisfied with the current one or if youre just looking for a change.
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Whats Next After Creating A Website
Once your website is online, you can continue to edit and optimize your website. But there are plenty of other things you can do. Here are some tips:
- Create a professional business email. With a business email, we mean email on your own domain. This allows you to communicate in a professional manner with customers and prospects. You can create multiple accounts for different departments and customers.
- Get started with online marketing to get more traffic to your website. We offer various marketing tools to help you rank higher in search engines, create advertisements, and set up an email marketing campaign. Please note, our marketing tools are not included in every plan.
- Follow the performance of your site with statististics. With this tool you can see how many people visit your website, from which countries your website is visited, and which pages receive the most views. For more in-depth data and extensive reports, you can to your website.
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Add Pages To Your Google Site Website
If you only need one page on your site, you’re all doneas is our example About Zapier page. Or, you can keep building your site with extra pages.
Add extra pages from the second tab in the right toolbar. Just add a title for your page, and it’ll automatically be added to the menu in your site’s header. You can add the same sections to any pageand if you want to copy something from one page to another, just select that section of your site, press CMD + C or Ctrl + C, then paste it on the new page.
You can drag-and-drop pages to the order you want with their 3-dot button. Or, drag a page under another page to turn it into a subpage, something you can also do from the menu on the right of each page.
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How To Buy A New Domain Name
If you dont already own a domain name, and you want a custom domain for your new site, then you may have to bite the bullet and pay the fee.
Registering a new domain requires you to work with a domain registrar like NameCheap or GoDaddy.
No matter where you buy, you can expect to pay about $10 USD for a one year registration of your custom .com domain. If you lock down your domain for 2, 3, 4, or 5 extra years, then you may get a small discount, but that $10 USD fee is still pretty hard to beat.
Of course, certain extensions vary in price. Websites that end with .net, for example, tend to cost $2 or $3 more than a .com domain, as do websites that end with .org.
Today, there are dozens of new Top Level Domains, or TLDs, that let your website end with all sorts of crazy combinations including .club or .us.com. These TLDs vary widely in price and are often owned by private resellers. In general, .com is the safest bet when youre buying a brand new domain. Its the one recognized around the world.
Make Sure Your Website Is Well
Think of your website as a library.
Your website structure will become increasingly important the more content you add to your website.
When learning how to create a website, you need to get expert at organizing your site in a way that makes sense to your visitors and easy for them to get around it.
A crucial part here is the navigation menu. Once youve created some pages, its time to make them available to your visitors on the site. You can do that under Appearance > Menus.
The first step here, is to give your new menu a name, then click Create Menu.
After that, you can choose which content to add to it on the left. For example, tick the boxes next to pages you want to appear in the menu, then click Add to Menu.
You can drag and drop menu items to your desired order and even turn them into sub-items by moving them underneath others like below. Once you are satisfied, choose the menu position where youd like for this menu to appear .
Click Save Menu again and go to your sites front end to see the new menu in action.
Ultimately, you want to reflect a structure that makes sense for your site and helps visitors get to where they need to go.
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Adding Cname To Github Repo
First of all, youll need to add a CNAME file to your GitHub repo. Now, just as adding a normal file, it can be done by two ways.
One way is to create a new file called CNAME and in that file, add the domain name then commit and push the changes from Git bash or your terminal.
Second way is to do it directly from GitHub,
- Name the file CNAME
- In the contents, add the domain name
Thats it, GitHub part is over
What Can You Do With Google Sites
Maybe you want to make a detailed site with pages and pages of info, as did with details about Google apps. Perhaps you’ve built an online course, and would like to share it with the world as did with the older Google Sites. You might need a site for your brand, as Steegle and DPI Partners built with the older and newer Google Sites, respectively. Or, you could want a way to share contact info and calendars with your class, as Señora Aguirre did in the new Google Sites.
You can build all of those and more in Google Sites.
And, it’s free. With just a standard Google account, you can make as many Google Sites as you want for free. The new Google Sites uses your Google Drive account to store images and files you share on your site, so you can even store up to 15GB of files for your sites for free, shared with your other Google apps.
The only catch is that by default, your site will be on Google’s domain, with an address like sites.google.com/view/yoursite.
Want a site on your own domain? Just create a G Suite account for your domain for $5/month per person on your team, and you can link your domain to Google Sites from your G Suite Sites admin, then follow these directions to add your site to the new domain.
Tip: Check out our in-depth guide on setting up a G Suite account in chapter 1 of this book to make a Google account for your domain.
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