Is your site not showing up in web searches? There are several reasons that could cause this to happen. The following are scenarios that may cause pages to not show up in search along with steps you can take to solve the problem.

If you just launched your site or added new pages, it is very likely major search engines like Google and Bing simply haven’t had a chance to index them. Indexing occurs when the search engine “crawls” your site and records every page and link. This is outside of TIME Sites control and is solely up to the search engines to execute.

You can expedite the process by re-indexing and submitting your sitemap to Google and Bing.

Please note that submitting your site for indexing does not guarantee an immediate action on the search engines part, it just notifies the crawler of your request.

Make sure you have Index and Follow checked in Website Settings in and Page Settings on your site.

The easiest way to do this is to simply run an exact search of your site’s URL. For example, https://www.yourdomain.com or https://yoursubdomain.brandcast.com

If your site doesn’t show up for this search, then it has not yet been indexed. Use the method mentioned above to submit your site for indexing.

If your site shows up for a search of the URL, it has been indexed; however, ranking for specific keywords and expressions requires meticulous planning and cultivation.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process used to advance organic search rankings for your website on search engines. Remember that the best thing you can do for SEO is to produce and share quality content on your website on a regular basis -- this brings more visitors to your site, increases the amount of time people spend on your site, and increases the number of referrals to your site.

You can also leverage social media, emails, and other services to share your site by including "like" buttons and twitter links on your page design.

Increased traffic along with more links to your site from other websites will better your SEO ranking. And remember that it's important to use relevant keywords and strong descriptions for your site and pages. (These can be managed from the settings icon in your top menu bar.)

To make sure you've optimized your TIME Sites site for SEO, check out our complete checklist of best practices.

If your website used to be hosted or built on a different platform and web pages or content is ranked differently, a page or series of pages were likely transferred with different URLs.

Best practices dictate that during a migration you endeavor to keep your site architecture consistent. This ensures that you get to keep all the valuable link equity that you’ve accumulated on your existing site.

This process can be easily managed with the proper foresight and planning.

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