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Comment by Jedi72 | Hacker News Reader

Google isnt even a good search engine any more. I tried finding my friends website, www.catbartlett.com.au, with the terms "Freelance graphic designer Cat Bartlett Perth Western Australia" - pretty specific, but the first page is nothing but LinkedIn profile links and random mentions of her in testimonials. If it takes thousands of $$ in SEO to get found, how is that a useful search engine? We might as well go back to human-submitted catalogues.

I think the Google vision is to become internet gatekeepers, not to be a useful tool for finding things. That's why they need to die.

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This is most likely a WiX configuration issue. The HTML source for https://www.catbartlett.com.au/ contains

  <meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>

Maybe try https://support.wix.com/en/article/enabling-search-engines-e... ?

The website also gets a 0/100 pagescore [1] because of "noindex". Plus the <title> tag has a single word "design"...nothing about the contents of the site. It only's mention of "Cat Bartlett Graphic Design" 1x and is in an <h5> tag halfway down the page (not repeat anywhere nor in an H1 tag.

No wonder google can't find it. This is SEO 101 that Google will tell you how to fix for free.

[1] https://sitechecker.pro/seo-report/https://www.catbartlett.c...

Ironically for a site seemingly dedicated to checking other sites, it's unusable on mobile (especially after the over-wide and unscrollable "create an account" modal takes over)

On google mobile is actually a factor in page ranking, if you're not mobile friendly you won't rank. Obviously this person needs some help w/ their website, if they were on wordpress with a good mobile theme, and good page load they'd definitely be ranked first for that serp.

I have to doubt that this is a problem with Google. Either your friend's website was just launched (and not yet indexed), or your friend's site seems to have unusually bad SEO and configuration. Doing a Google search just for the URL brings up no results for the actual site -- though it does bring up all of your friend's social media sites:

https://www.google.com/search?q="www.catbartlett.com.au"

I don't think the problem is with Google. I think the problem is how the site is set up. I hope this is not something particular to Wix sites:

http://www.catbartlett.com.au/robots.txt

I agree. Searching those exact terms on DDG does not yield the desired site on the first 3 pages (I gave up searching after that).

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