My wordpress site was getting indexed (only home page) but didn't have any description under it in Google. So I switched themes - I used seo plug in and everything. Still same thing. When I realized I should check source code, I saw under this: <meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' /> -- does this mean it's telling search engines to not follow my site? Why would it do this when I never asked it to? That has never happened to any of my sites before. How do I get this to change?
From what I'm understanding, 'noindex' means that the crawler is asked to not index the website. 'nofollow' means that the crawler is asked not to go through the links on the page and see what they contain. Check your header.php file in the template theme. It may also be there from a plugin that modifies the header for SEO or similar.
why would a plugin in all-in-one SEO tell search engines not to crawl my site??? I looked at source code of whole site. How do I look at just header?
It wasn't. There was a version of wordpress that defaulted to noindex a few versions ago. Dashboard -> Settings -> Privacy and change it to allow the spiders.
at cpanel, if u used fantastico for auto create wordpress blogs - it's default check noindex. be careful
wow, I'll check into it. That is a really, really crappy bug . I lost months of being indexed because of this. Everyone sings the praises of wordpress and how user friendly it is...but you know what? This wouldn't have happened to me if my site was just HTML.
I have another question. Now that I fixed the nofollow issue, the site seems to have been indexed without proper permalinks. It indexes the tags, but posts are like page2 page3 instead of post title. I checked in the wordpress dashboard under permalinks and it is checked for custom structure - /%postname%/. Isn't that what I want? Why isn't it indexing the post name then?
Going to use this as an example so we're all looking at the same thing: http://seniorcarefranchise.net/page/2 That's an index page, not a Post or Tag page. For example, here's one on my blog: http://drmikessteakdinner.com/index2.html -> Dr. Mike's Steak Dinner | Page 2 of 241 You just have yours set to show a single Post while I have mine set to show 5 (or 6. I forget) Here's the content indexed within google. This is a Post URL and please notice the title: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://seniorcarefranchise.net/elderly-care-jobs/ If you want to remove those index pages from google (and I'll say right up front that's not a good idea as you're removing internal links from your site) create a robots.txt file within the root of your install with the following: User-agent: * Disallow: /page/ Sitemap: http://seniorcarefranchise.net/sitemap.xml.gz Hope this helps, -drmike
So you are saying I should leave that? I thought urls like that were bad for SEO? Right I really want each post to appear as it's own page. But my other sites where this is done don't say page 1 or 2 - they just have page title (post title really) That's what I wanted! That must be new, wasn't there before. But's only indexing one page..out of several. I wanted to make this was right before adding more articles. I'm not going to remove them if it would hurt. I just would prefer page/post titles coming up. This does help immensely - the nofollow default bug really threw me! I thought this had sometning to do with it maybe.
A link is a link. Having said that, if you're worried about dupe content, please give this a read. Look for the code fix under Adding ‘noindex, follow’ tags: http://www.seoresearcher.com/how-to-make-your-wordpress-blog-duplicate-content-safe.htm Hope this helps, -drmike
Suppose I have installed a WordPress blog few minutes ago. Does it have nofollow and noindex by default?
Dup content is a myth. Its been proven many times over. Only dup content within the bounds of your own site can cause a problems.