WP installed via Fantastico is Blocking Your Site from Search Engines

Update: this is no longer happening, and most hosts have replaced Fantastico with Softaculous.

This is a quick warning to double check your Privacy settings in WordPress.

It seems that WordPress 2.8 (and now the latest 2.9.2) versions are defaulting the privacy setting to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” when installed via Fantastico in cPanel.

This means that your robots.txt file is set to block search engine spiders from crawling your site. This is obviously not ideal and it baffles me why WP have chosen to now make this the default setting! Read the rest of this entry »