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Wordpress noindex nofollow meta tags problem
One of the most frustrating thing about using open-source applications is that you never know what are some of the default obscure settings the application comes with. It doesn’t help when I add my own stupidity into the equation.
I found out today, 3 months after this site went live, wondering why it still hasn’t been indexed by the big ‘G’. It turns out that Wordpress, by default, has the privacy setting turn on, preventing search engines like Yahoo and Google to index the pages on this site! Doh!
What really gets me is why would Wordpress come with a default setting like that? Doesn’t it make sense that if I want to publish content, that it should be searchable? Even if it’s a privacy setting, it should be a bit more obvious that the setting is turned ON! Maybe someone can shed some light on this…
In any case, I found out when I was doing some HTML parsing using PHP that I spotted this on my site:
For those of you who are not familiar with this setting, it’s basically a directive to the any robots visiting your site, not to index the page and not to assign any weight to any outgoing links from this page.
If you want to find out more about this, read the article at http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
So how do you remove it? Well it’s amazingly simple. You remove it by turning the Privacy setting off at Dashboard->Options->Privacy as show below.
Well, that’s all there is to it. Hope the ‘bots will start indexing. Fingers crossed.
In: Website Building/SEO · Tagged with: nofollow, noindex, SEO, wordpress
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I just found out about this as well and killed a huge client’s SERP with this… It should come back after a while, but there might be some serious damage done.
I also found some other sites based on WP that had this turned on accidentally.
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Same here!
However i was kinda of lucky since i only start to working WP and building links a few weeks.
Manage to spot it before it’s really get to damage my site. Thanks
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thank you man,
your post really saved me a lots of time .
though i knew the settings exist , in my new blog i failed to set the configuration .
hence no crawlers or bots visited my site .
its http://www.katrinakaifs.com . thank you and your post really helped .
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Thank you for showing importance of nofollow and dofollow attributes.
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Now verify the existence of meta tags in the input URLs and Compare the calculated length of each with its corresponding Google standard length and get reports the appropriate analysis with
http://siteopsys.com/meta-tag-analyzer.tool
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Thanks this worked. It is also helpfull to install a seo pack like the platinum seo pack to to generate the tag index follow.
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@Eldee Good article. There actually is good reason for it being there and set to private. Many blog and web developers (for lack of a spectacular internal server) have no choice but to put a site online before it is finished, in essence while they are still building the site. In terms of SEO, yes this is problematic to have it turned off from search engines, but the alternate situation is far worse. I’ve had 4 different domains ‘burned’ by the big ‘G’ because I was still building the site, had the ‘lorem ipsum dolor’ text on the site and accidentally had the index on. So the big ‘G’ looked at my site, decided it was garbage and sandboxed me for 9months+. So, my point in the end is, its better to have it off by default and have to turn it on then the alternative.
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I can understand not wanting the whole Lorem Ipsum or Hello World bit to be indexed, however this setting needs to be *MUCH* more prominent. I’ve been deactivating/reactivating each of my plugins, skins, etc, etc, etc ad nauseum trying to remove that damned noindex,nofollow tag. Seriously, I was close to going postal on my PC.
*Thank you* for this thread – it saved allot of anguish!