I love WordPress most of the time. It simple, has an extremely customisable front end, a lovely intuitive admin interface that almost all clients can get to grips with easily – oh and its free!
So I have built many a site with it – some simple, some complicated – always to great effect and general client satisfaction. Go me!
I had been recommended a new hosting provider that a client of mine had been using and their rates seemed very reasonable for just a small WordPress blogging site. So I took the plunge and signed up with them. Plus they had Fantastico one-click installs available for most of major packages – WordPress included.
So rather than me faff around and create a MySql db, then feed the data into the WordPress install screen after I had uploaded all the install files etc, I could just click once on the Fantastico icon and – ta da – one minute later I’m looking at my shiny new blog!.
So far so easy. WordPress theme built – designer happy, client happy – I got paid.
So how come 2 months after launch the site is not being found on any Google/Bing/Yahoo searches? Absolutely no search engine traffic is showing up in Google Analytics. Its not as if the clients site is very niche either – and yes it has been SEO-ed up the ying yang before you point the finger at moi!
I started to worry – “Maybe Google has blacklisted this site because I used text-indent:-9999px too many times??”
Then I found the answer:
http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress-news/new-wordpress-blog-privacy-settings
In this article Jeff mentions that by default in one-click installs WordPress is set to be hidden from search engines unless you explicitly go and switch the setting to “Allow search engines” – I couldn’t believe it! WordPress seemed to be deliberately sabotaging my attempts to let people find my site!
Arrgh! Now I just need to grovel to my client and give her a bit of free consultancy to make up for the fact that she had just ten visitors for the past two months…. wish me luck
Update:
Just as a warning, its not as easy as just flicking the switch and suddenly your site is listed on Google.
After 2 days it still wasn’t showing so here’s what I did. Maybe it was one , or a combination of things that worked – who knows?
1) Changed the Published date of all the pages in the site (I know this might not be feasible in a large blog but this site only has 6 or 7 static pages)
2) Submitted (and resubmitted) a sitemap to Google (via Google Webmaster tools)
3) Used the links I found on this (realy useful) site to resubmit my site to Google : http://www.feedthebot.com/
I’m not sure which one worked but a day or so after I played with these the site started showing up in Google results – phewee!
Hey,
I found the link to your site on the Sagepay forums and being a nosy bugger decided to look around.
Just FYI, the "allow search engines" option is part of the setup when you download and install WordPress from the official source. Fantastico side-steps that option in their "one click install" but sets it privacy mode. I think thats more of a problem with Fantastico picking the wrong default rather than a problem with WordPress itself.
Newer versions of WordPress inform you that privacy mode is enabled on every page of the admin area too.
I've seen some strange things from one-click installs over the years, one of them installs over 150 themes and plugins by default, totally unnecessary when you consider you can now browse their theme and plugin repositories from within WordPress and install within a couple of clicks, no FTP required!