Does Google Index WordPress Drafts

October 11th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Google uses spiders or robots to “crawl” the Internet for new pages to add to its index. Google’s indexes allow the servers to more quickly find relevant search results, such as your blog posts, without having to pour through every Web page at the time of the search.

According to Google, its spiders find new pages to add to the index by searching for links on pages that already exist in the indexes. If you have save your WordPress post as a draft, it is not yet published on your blog there are no links to your draft for Google’s spiders to discover. Thus, your WordPress drafts will not become part of Google’s indexes until after you publish the post and the spiders have a chance to crawl your site once more.

WordPress does provide temporary viewing addresses for drafts so that you can preview them before publishing. However, even if you created a link to this temporary URL from a page on your blog that already exists in Google’s indexes, WordPress only allows the blog author and administrators to view drafts. WordPress will not grant access to the content of the post to Google’s spiders and your draft will not become part of Google’s indexes.

When you maintain a blog or website with WordPress, you want visitors to be able to find your site by searching for relevant terms. For example, if your blog is about graphics and you create a post about the best editing programs, you will benefit if your blog post appears in Google’s results for “graphic editing software.” Thus, you should ensure that there is a link to every blog post, page or other content on your site so that Google can add this content to its index and you can increase exposure to your blog. WordPress drafts do not contribute to this exposure. If you are creating a time-sensitive or surprise blog post, you will not want Google to index your drafts before you publish the post to the public.

WordPress does allow you to change the status of a post back to “Draft” after the post has been published. You may do this if you have accidentally publish an incomplete post or published a draft too early. It is possible that Google could crawl your site and add the post to its indexes during this time. It is impossible to pinpoint how much time Google requires to index your site. According to the company, spiders “regularly crawl the web to” add new pages to the index. However, Google gives no concrete time-frame and states that factors such as PageRank, links to a page and other factors affect crawl frequency. In the event that you accidentally publish a WordPress draft, Google may not see it to add it to the index if there are fewer links to the post.

Filed under: Google Information · Tags: Drafts, Google, Index, WordPress

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