My WordPress website was hosted somewhere else, then the domain parked at a parking website, and in spring 2025 moved to InfinityFree. I use Cloudflare for DNS/proxy.
Everything worked fine before, but I noticed the site doesn’t appear in Google search. My Yoast XML sitemaps generate, but the sitemap URLs either spin endlessly or appear as HTML pages. I’ve already:
Verified robots.txt allows crawling
Cleared Cloudflare cache and turned Development Mode on
Toggled Yoast XML sitemaps on/off
Google Search Console shows the sitemap as “Unknown” and last read about a year ago. I’m not sure if Cloudflare, caching, or sitemap generation is blocking Google from indexing.
Can anyone advise step by step how to restore indexing for my site? Should I resubmit sitemaps, regenerate them, or check something specific in Cloudflare or WordPress?
When I search Google with the query site:thevaluetrail.com, I do see the pages from your website. That tells me that your website is being indexed by Google.
However, there is a difference of course between “the site is in search results” and “the site is ranked high for the keywords I’m targeting”. Searching for “the value trail consulting” shows me a large number of results, which don’t seem to include your website in the first few pages.
Sitemaps are useful, but they are not a silver bullet to all problems of SEO, and having a good sitemap isn’t enough to convince Google that your website is actually what people are looking for. And if Google doesn’t think your website is relevant, then it will not show it.
You might know this already, but your site appears consistently high, at least on the first page result, in other major search engines, all except Google…
Is this domain setup new? Maybe give it some time. If you have other online presence used before (e.g. gumroad), be sure to update all of those to include your new site. Also presence in recognizable social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, X, etc…) will increase your online visibility. However, this is no guarantee Google will look at you favorably, even if you set priority and update frequency high. It might be even disadvantageous to directly manipulate bots and tailor your pages exclusively for high page ranking.
Some things that may help you to improve on:
1.Use photos that are organic to your brand, company. Original and unique photos will help identify you as truly you. Stock photos can be used by anybody. Hopefully someone not in the same business. AI-generated images are popular but I do not know how Google handles these and affects your site.
In the About section, it talks about the founder, but I found a chair, with label of small office. It would be better if you have a human photo here since it is already available in other sites. Tool tips/titles are also often neglected but your site increases accessibility if images failed to load, provided the images are all relevant instead of placeholders.
In the Contact section, based on other sites, there is an office in Chicago. But there is no mention here. If you move totally online without any physical office location, why is there still a photo with envelope for snail mail? Also the icons for emails, landline, mobile phone, and letters are not clickable and this is a bit confusing.
It appears the website has been online since 2019. Being stuck 6 years behind gives the impression this is an abandoned site or no new updates. A simple PHP or Javascript to include the current year will help.
This is not a critique mind you but something to ponder upon. We all want to appear in Google - in the first page at the very least. Good luck!
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll update the pages you mentioned, refresh images, and keep the site current. After resubmitting the sitemap, it looks like there are no errors now. Really appreciate your tips!