I was wondering why my post forum pages were not being indexed by google yet i had activated a mod for search engine friendly urls to work with the forum script. I'm using Simple Machines Forum. The forum is been up for a couple of months Last week I generated an xml sitemap for the forum and logged in to my Google Webmaster account and added my forum homepage link to see if i could get the deeper pages indexed. In order to verify my site i needed to place some code in the head tags in the source code of the forum theme ((Babylon Theme) - I think it comes with the default installation). Logging in to my smf forum as admin i went to modify themes and after opening the correct page php page, as i'm about to place the code in the head tag section, then i notice this <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> Seems the coders of the theme put it there deliberately. So it seems Google must be following this command. I've removed it and will wait to see if google will index the page
Hey there, Its much easier creating that google html file rather than inserting the meta tag. Well, they are both easy, but the meta tag change takes longer for me because I use templates. You might want to make sure the noindex tag are not within links to your other pages, the important ones anyway. You may not have trouble though if you submitted the sitemap. Good luck getting everything indexed. Sincerely, Travis Walters
Actually, the meta robot been around for quite sometimes and it always been that way, both google / yahoo and even live follow robots guidelines. YOu should recreate your xml sitemaps back since some xml generator do follow those guidelines too