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WP installed via Fantastico is Blocking Your Site from Search Engines
Posted on October 26th, 2009 6 commentsUpdate: 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!
Most people simply wont know about it until they see in their stats (such as Webmaster Tools) that their site is blocked.
So the first thing you should do now when installing a new blog is go to Settings > Privacy and change it to allow all traffic.
Also don’t forget to go back and check your current blogs to ensure that this setting is not causing your website to be blocked in the search engines.
This does not occur if you install WP manually and select that you want your site to appear in search engines during the installation process.
6 responses to “WP installed via Fantastico is Blocking Your Site from Search Engines”
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Great article…I’ve found the same thing myself and actually wrote a similar article at
http://www.seofool.com/wordpress-blocking-seoIt really only takes like 20 seconds to check this setting…I check it after I make any changes to my wordpress blog…even if it’s just adding a new plugin.
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Great post.. and great tip too. I’ve heard about it, but never noticed this happening on my current blogs.. should double check again after reading this lol
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Thanks Rebecca…do you know if you have to request reconsideration from google webmaster tools to get them to come back after you’ve turned the privacy setting off?
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Man, I didn’t even know that. I’m going to check my blog’s settings right away to make sure 2.9 isn’t doing the same.
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John Elder - the seoFool! October 29th, 2009 at 16:52