New TLD SEO Issues

[Guy_E]

So after the release of the new TLDs, I decided to purchase a .guru to setup a blog on it. After posting some content, I went through and went to submit the site to GWMT... did a 'Fetch as Google' and submitted the site to the index (including all URLs the bot finds), but Google doesn't seem to want to crawl the site.

Anyone else having issues with the new TLDs?

[Robert Charlton]

Hi Guy_E, and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I'm thinking that the issue may not be with the new TLDs, but I don't know that for sure. It may be with inbound linking.

Do you have any natural inbound links from sites already in Google's index?

[Guy_E]

Thanks Robert.

No, not yet.

But in my experience, after setting up a new website & throwing some content on them, Google tends to pick them up relatively quickly especially after using "Fetch as Google" in GWMT.

[Bones]

After a bit of Googling, I did manage to find a few .guru URLs in the index, so it may just be a case of patience.

There is usually a delay between Googlebot realising that there is new content to be crawled and it appearing in the index. What sort of time frames are we talking here?

WordPress does also have a "Search Engine Visibility" option (Settings > Reading) which discourages search engine crawling - so you may want to double check it if you're using that platform.

[Guy_E]

Interesting; I did a bit of Googling yesterday and couldn't find any in the index yet.

I set the website up just over a week ago; and did the "Fetch as Google" request in GWMT a little over 2 days ago.

Definitely not new to SEO; i've been in the industry for a few years but haven't experienced this sort of "lag" since the days before caffeine.

[aristotle]

Have you watched your visitor logs to see if googlebot has been showing up?

[Guy_E]

Hi aristotle; yes I have and it's showed up numerous times from 66.249.79.3 ... which again makes me think that possibly Google has "some" issues with indexing the new TLDs

[GreenDog18]

I have a .guru and it was indexed within 12 hours of posting content using wordpress. Crazy thing is I have never posted the word guru on the entire blog but yet I rank for keyword guru already. I guess it might be in the source code somewhere though.

[Guy_E]

Very interesting GreenDog18. Have you sought to build links yet, or is this with pure content?

Google hasn't picked up my website at all; yet there's few blog posts with content - not really optimized for specific keywords, but I would have assumed that after using the "Fetch as Google" tool in GWMT, that it would have been indexed after a week...

And through my research thus far, I haven't been able to find any indexed .guru sites yet.

[GreenDog18]

No links, 1 article. I pinged the site with Ping O Matic.

Do a google search. site:.guru

There are tons of them.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, Guy_E!

Google doesn't seem to want to crawl the site.

I did a bit of Googling yesterday and couldn't find any in the index yet.

it's showed up numerous times from 66.249.79.3

so googlebot is crawling but you aren't finding results in search.
is this a search for your key phrases?
can you find any of your urls using a site:example.guru search?
are you searching the google.com index or a country-specific index?

is GWT reporting anything notable about crawling or indexing?

[Guy_E]

Thanks for your response Phranque.

It seems I have spoken to soon as I just rechecked again using a variety of search operators and it now appears to have picked up a couple of pages... note to self: patience is a virtue.

Thanks for your help everyone. :)