Is WordPress Blocking Your Site From the Search Engines?
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
I’ll admit it….it took a while for me to come around to using blog software (I’ve spent 13 years creating my web sites using notepad and typing out raw HTML code dammit!), but now I live for wordpress! It’s just so easy to use!
And WordPress is great from an SEO point of view because it automatically does a lot of on page optimizing for you, and the all-in-one SEO pack plugin does a lot more.
But there’s one thing that WordPress does (or can do) that can ruin your SEO efforts….
I’ve seen this more than once…people install wordpress or upgrade to 2.8x and suddenly drop out of the search engines.
What’s going on?
Well, not always…but sometimes something goes a little wacky during installation and your privacy settings get messed up, and wordpress tweaks your robots.txt file to exclude the site from all search engines.
How can you tell if your wordpress installation has gone smoothly?
Log into your wordpress administrative area and Click “Settings” then click “Privacy”.
You should see these two options:
- I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers
- I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors
Be sure to click the first option telling wordpress that you want your site to be visible to the search engines. That’s supposed to be the default setting, but like I said, sometimes something goes haywire and the second option gets set by default….and then you’re screwed!
If you find yourself screwed, don’t worry. Just click the first setting, then resubmit your xml sitemap to Google and the googlebot will soon swing back by your site and re-index you. It may take a couple weeks if you’re terribly unlucky, but chances are that sooner than that you’ll be back in business at the search engines.
The moral of the story is that anytime you change wordpress, or upgrade to a new version, or install anything…take 20 seconds to check on that privacy setting!
Has this sort of thing ever happened to you? Comment below!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
