I have been asked to maintain a small commercial web site. One of the issues brought to my attention is that the site does not show up in any search results other than Google (the owners did subscribe to Adwords, but have canceled due to the cost). Even entering the URL does not return results in MSN, Yahoo, or ASK. What could cause not even the URL to generate a result?

Thanks.

You could try submitting the site to each of those engines directly.

Do you have link backs?
Do you have a sitemap?
Did you submit the sitemap to Yahoo?
Did you advertise on MSN and Yahoo?

Peace,

I had a simliar problem with my websites not showing up in MSN's search results. I recommend going to the following URL:
https://feedback.live.com/eform.aspx?mkt=en-us&productkey=wlsearch

State that the webpage you were looking for was not in the search results and enter your sites URL and they will look into your website. They indexed my site in less then 48 hours. As for the website not appearing in any other search engine, I can only recommend that you spread your websites URL around the internet and use Google's Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately due to the fact that I do not have five posts I cannot post a link to Google's Webmaster Tools page however if you just search "Google Webmaster" on Google it will be the first result.

Are you 100% sure that there is definitely no 'noindex' tag placed in the header section?

I heard an interview with Google's Matt Cutts recently and he mentioned that Ben Harper's site was not indexed for a long time because the webmaster had accidentally place the noindex tag in the meta tags section.

Thanks to all of you for your input. I have taken your suggestions and done the following:

Created a sitemap
Created a robots.txt file
Submitted the site to the search engines

Still need to do some work on link-backs.

If you did not submit the site to search engines then that is likely the reason for it not showing up.

dmoz.org

this site submits your site to all search engines for free. might take a few weeks though.

Did you create a Google XML sitemap though?

Shaliza:

Yes I did. The host provided Google Webmaster Tools and that is where I created the sitemap.

Mecha:

Thanks - I am gathering info to submit to dmoz's directory

Ken

maybe your site has been canceled