Hi
It has been FAR TOO LONG, even though my website has great content, and plenty of it, my website traffic is basically still zero! Something about 4SEO is not working right!
The thing is, great content is relative (see below). That you think your content is great does not matter. What matters is that a/ Google thinks it's great and b/ Google thinks it it is a great fit for something people are searching.
4SEO cannot do anything to convince Google that your content is great. It only makes sure the technical steps on the site are good, pages are discovered by Google and it also helps you in adding things like meta description and page title - which actually are not used by Google for ranking, but only when displaying serch results.
Another company said that maybe the contents of robots.txt was wrong,
That's correct. Your robots.txt file is wrong. It lists the wrong sitemap address:
I suspect this was not updated when you changed your URL rewriting setting to stop using /index.php/ in URLs. 4SEO can update it for you.
If you go to Sitemaps | Settings, you 'll see the Add to robots.txt file setting:
Switch that off, wait a few seconds and switch that back on. This will cause 4SEO to rewrite the robots.txt line that lists the current sitemap.
You should learn about the robots.txt file, it's an important tool when doing SEO.
There's no real evidence that Google has ever processed my website completely, There's no real evidence that Google has ever processed my website completely,
Use your search console crawling report for that. They will tell you how many pages they have crawled and how many were indexed.
Submitting a sitemap, whether through 4SEO or manually, is only a hint. Google will not crawl your pages just because you submit a sitemap.
I cannot do any manual sitemap submission to Google Search Console.
Why? You can always submit your sitemap manually through the search console. There's no need for that but you can always do it. You can copy your sitemap URL from the Sitemaps page in 4SEO and submit that.
I firmly believe that if Google had EVER processed my sitemap successfully, my website traffic would be many times greater than it is currently!
Why would you think that? That's not what a sitemap is for. A sitemap role is to tell Google what you think are the important pages on your site. It's a hint, they'll always do what they want, and their first priority is to understand your content and decide by themselves if they like it or not, and whether it's suited for what people want.
About how they do that in recent years, I'd suggest researching what's called "E.A.T." (Expertise / Authoritativeness/Trustworthiness).
Another major point, still in 2022, is backlinks. To demonstrate authority, having reliable and recognized websites linking to your content is a major deciding factor in getting Google to trust your pages.
There's actually nothing that can make Google brings traffic to your site. That's entirely their decision. The only thing you can do - and that's what 4SEO does - is to ensure all the technical steps on your site are taken. And then work on "marketing" your pages, getting people to link to it ("backlinks") and so on.
What 4SEO cannot do - and not extension will ever be able to do is:
- create content that matches keywords/queries that searchers on Google are actually searching for. For that you need to research keywords that you want to rank for and have high quality content that match these keywords. That's not enough but it's a good start.
- create content that Google think is valuable for the people searching on their site
The key point is that it's not enough to have content, what matters is that Google is convinced it's the content they want. If they are not convinced, your results are displayed on page 5, 10 or 20 and you don't get much traffic.
Hope this helps,
Best regards
Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com / @weeblr
