Wordpress noindex / nofollow problem solved

WordPress noindex / nofollow problem solved

Last week I noticed my precious little blog posts, which have been nicely indexed by Google, were dropping out of the index like flies. Of course I should have checked the source code but it took Aaron’s note today to make me realize the blog was placing a noindex/nofollow everywhere, making it impossible to get indexed.

Appears this also happened to the illustrious Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, and there I learned to flip the “privacy” feature back to allow searches in.

To fix the WordPress NOINDEX NOFOLLOW problem click DASHBOARD > OPTIONS > PRIVACY and select to allow search engines.

I’m still a bit concerned that somebody may have done this maliciously, but never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably attributed to stupidity (or some bug in the system).

Anyway, who would stoop so low? Duck hunters?

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August 23, 2006 - Posted by JoeDuck | blogs, search, SEO, Websites

11 Comments »

thanks for this, I wondered why my site dropped off G and couldnt find the setting for this at 1st glance

Comment by nhggfu | February 18, 2008 | Reply
Thanks a lot for this post. You helped me out big-time!!

Comment by Rob | January 31, 2009 | Reply
I’ve never understood this no-follow-link stuff. I understand that even a no-follow link is “valuable” to a search spider in reaching further sites and that is one reason why ‘comment spam’ is valuable to the spammer.

I think it highly admirable that you do not instantly decide on some sort of malicious conspiracy when it may just be a simple bug. I guess making a record of all the settings and comparing them from time to time might be wise just to see if the differences are significant or not.

Comment by FoolsGold | January 31, 2009 | Reply
I had the exact same problem! I was wondering and wondering why on earth Google is not indexing my site. In two weeks my daily hits went from over 1000 to 6 per day.

The funny thing is, I do not remember tweaking that setting… :/ I guess must have been really, really tired when doing it.

Anyways, thanks a bunch!

Comment by Säästäminen | March 21, 2009 | Reply
GoDaddy hosted sites BEWARE! I was setting up a client with a blog about auto warranties and on Dreamhost, the privacy setting is defaulted to “off” when using the One Click install, but on GoDaddy it is defaulted to “on”, so nothing will be indexed!

Comment by Auto Warranty Reviews | June 11, 2009 | Reply
Thank you so much, been pulling my hair all week. I’ve check the settings for the SEO plugins but no avail. Almost gone bald. Thanks so much!!!!

Comment by Arrow SEO | July 9, 2009 | Reply
Useful post….Many of us commit this mistake. There is a wordpress plugin on same called ultimate no follow noindex(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-noindex-nofollow-tool/).Do you think that is useful?How should we configure it to get best results?

Comment by Abhishek | July 10, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for the information. For those of you running WP 2.8.x IT is now Dashboard-> Settings -> Privacy -> “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” -> Save Changes

Comment by Andre T. Fraser | September 22, 2009 | Reply
Thank you. That was extremely helpful to me. It appears that by default WordPress is set to add no follow to every page, unless perhaps one of my plugins did it.

Comment by Lavern Gingerich | September 30, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for your help,

Comment by Mehul | October 15, 2009 | Reply
Thanks! What makes this problem harder to solve than it should be, is that if the non-searchable option is selected by default (or by some bug or some evil host), then if you run a robots.txt validator on your site to try and see if that’s the problem, it will tell you that robots.txt EXISTS and is set to ‘nofollow.’ And then you can spend HOURS trying to find this robots.txt file…which does not exist.

Comment by Jason | October 19, 2009 | Reply