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Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. A few things to note:

  • I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress
  • Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked
  • A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors
  • I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred
  • There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains
  • The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts

As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives?

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  • Pretty difficult to know without being provided with the URL. Have you got any data/info at all in Google WMT for the domain? What date in June did it go live (Google's index can take a number of weeks sometimes to update)? There may be some issue with DNS records/forwarding/hosting. Have you tried linking to the domain from Google+? This almost always gets a site indexed within hours...
    – zigojacko
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 9:19
  • Thanks! I hadn't tried linking from Google+. I'll see how that goes. There is data in WMT saying the pages have been crawled successfully, but not indexed. I checked the DNS records and nothing seems to be out the ordinary. The new site went live only a few weeks ago, but generally has had the same content since February. It hasn't been very long since the most recent version went live, but I would have expected it to show up due to the previous site.
    – chain_the_wheel
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 9:49
  • It takes Google a while to catch-up and GWT is notoriously slow at times. You can do a simple site:example.com search to see what you get. For me, this seems to be the most reliable method to know the status of things. Essentially, you threw a wrench into the works with the site change- we all go through this- and it will take a while to get it straight again. If your site appears using a site: search, then you should be fine soon enough.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jul 8, 2015 at 15:49
  • See the following related question: webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/43350/…
    – dan ♦
    Commented Jul 9, 2015 at 2:58
  • @jtolla I've reopened this so that you can add your edit as an answer below and accept it.
    – dan ♦
    Commented Jul 9, 2015 at 2:58

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Turns out we had a Pure Spam manual action on our domain. I'm assuming this was due to a previous owner's shady activities since the domain was first registered in 2011. I've submitted a detailed request for review.

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