Wordpress Blog Blocked by Metarobots
-
Upon receiving my first crawl report from new pro SEOMoz acc (yaay!) I've found that the wordpress blog plugged into my site hasn't been getting crawled due to being blocked by metarobots.
I'm not a developer and have very little tech expertise, but a search dug up that the issue stemmed from the wordpress site settings > privacy > Ask search engines not to index this site option being selected.
On checking the blog "Allow search engines to index this site" was selected so I'm unsure what else to check. My level of expertise means I'm not confident going into the back end of the site and I don't have a tech guy on site to speak to.
Has anyone else had this problem? Is it common and will I need to consult a developer to get this fixed?
Many thanks in advance for your help!
-
I didn't think there were any issues with the blog being crawled. I'm not seeing any errors in webmaster tools, and I'm def not doing anything tricky on the server side.
I don't even go near that stuff for fear of breaking summat.
Really appreciate your help Barry.
All the best,7
Pete
-
There shouldn't be a robots.txt file on the /blog section anyway, should always be in the root. It was just something to have a look at.
I'm having a look just now and also don't see any problems.
You've nothing in the robots.txt file and nothing in meta-robots for the header.
There's 42 pages in the site: command and a similar number in your sitemap.xml so I presume that's right. 6 pages in site:/blog which again looks right.
I've tried using SEOmoz's tools on your site though and it just tells me that your site doesn't resolve. edit Managed to get it to resolve on the 3rd try for a crawl, but using the on page report card checker it's still giving me problems.
You're definitely returning a 200 message with a site when I check using any other tool though, so I'd get in touch with SEOmoz directly and see what's wrong with their tool - help@seomoz.org
Just to confirm you're not doing anything tricky server side to prevent scraping are you?
-
Hi Barry,
Thanks for the reply, I'm checking out your recommendations now..
I checked http://debtmadesimple.co.uk/robots.txt and there is no Disallow for the blog.
I tried http://debtmadesimple.co/uk/wp-install/robots.txt I can't access the file you speak of.
I will try and download the plugin you mentioned, it would be good to get access to the robot file nonetheless.
Thanks again!
Pete
-
Hi Zach,
First I'd like to thank you for the speedy reply, I really appreciate your help.
The URL of the blog is http://www.debtmadesimple.co.uk/blog/.
Thanks again!
Pete
-
If you're not taking Zach up on his offer, have a look at http://yoursite.com/robots.txt and see if it has
User-agent: *
Disallow: (your blog url in here)If it does you'll need to edit your robots.txt file to not have anything you don't want disallowed in the disallow section. You can do this via ftp.
If it's in WP itself there may be another robots.txt file at http://yoursite.com/wp-install/robots.txt which, in theory, could also be preventing crawling if it has anything disallowed in there.
Again, editable via ftp or maybe this plugin - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-robots-txt/
As it already says that it should be public probably not WP, but worth a look anyway.
-
I'm a WP developer and an SEO, i'd be more than willing to do some troubleshooting here on the forums for you. If the settings>privacy is checked to allow search engines to crawl, then I doubt it's a WordPress issue in itself, though a plugin could do this.
What is the URL of your site? You may have a robots.txt that is blocking search engine crawlers, i've also seen a thing where all URLs on the site are noinexed and nofollowed.
Let me know and i'll take a quick look for you.
Zach
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is the Page Authority for posts in my blog so low
I have noticed that the Page Authority for my posts in my blog are all hovering around 1 and the rest of the pages on my website are around 20. The Domain Authority for my website is 16 and I think the page authority of my posts are negatively affecting my Domain Authority as I write more content. Any suggestions or recommendations as to why posts have such low Page Authority compared to similar pages. I have images, links, and great content in my posts, but they are considerably lower in Page Authority*
Technical SEO | | JoeyGedgaud0 -
Wordpress Pods and Wordpress SEO by Yoast
Hi I am optimising a new site that has been built in Wordpress using Pods. The Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin is not recognising any content on the site - has anyone any ideas on how to get around this - does it matter - is it the plugin that is at fault rahter than the set up of the site?
Technical SEO | | Highlandgael1 -
How to redirect my .com/blog to my server folder /blog ?
Hello SEO Moz ! Always hard to post something serious for the 04.01 but anyway let's try ! I'm releasing Joomla websites website.com, website.com/fr, website.com/es and so on. Usually i have the following folders on my server [ROOT]/com [ROOT]/com/fr [ROOT]/com/es However I would like to get the following now (for back up and security purpose). [ROOT]/com [ROOT]/es [ROOT]/fr So now what can I do (I gues .htaccess) to open the folder [ROOT]/es when people clic on website.com/es ? It sounds stupid but I really don't know. I found this on internet but did not answer my needs. .htaccess RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | AymanH
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(^/fr/.) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /sites/fr/$1 [L,R=301] Tks a lot ! Florian0 -
.me vs .com for new personal blog site
Hi guys, this is my first ever post on SEOMoz (woo!) I have researched and I did see someone else ask something similar but I still wasn't clear, so i hope this question is not considered a duplicate and can go on to help other people too Enough waffle For various reasons I am moving our company blog to startup a personal blog instead and I have bought a couple of appropriate domain names in a firstname/lastname format for the new blog, basically: myname.me and iammyname.com My question is, which would you consider 'better', if either, for SEO? (bonus point: are there any other non-SEO factors I should consider?) Obviously the second name is longer, but it is a .com and I hear all the time that .com is king and .me is waaaay behind Ultimately I want to rank #1 for my name If it was your site and your blog and you had my choices which one would you go for? Many thanks for your help. I'm looking forward to being part of the SEOMoz community and learning a lot from you guys, cheers, Nick
Technical SEO | | NickDavis0 -
Duplicate Title Tags On Blogs
Hello Mozzers, I have a client who has a blog and articles section on their website, due to the amount of content they have in these section they have multiples pages so it would be like.. www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p1 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p2 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p3 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p4 All obvioulsy with seperate content in each blog/article posts but the meta descriptions on title tags for this p1,p2,p3,p4 and so on are all the same, is this a major issue? and if so how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Prestige-SEO0 -
Advice on promoting a blog
Hi i am working on a new blog and would like to know if there are any sites where i can publish part of the new blog to gain traffic to my main blog. What i am looking at is, to publish part of a news story and then have people come to my main site after reading some of the new story. I have come across accidentally a couple over a year ago but cannot locate them now. I want people to be able to come to my site and read the whole story and then hopefully tell their friends. Also can anyone recommend decent social bookmarking sites that have a do follow on them to promote my blog please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
404 erros on wordpress blog
Both SEOMOZ and Google webmaster tools report lots of 404 errors throughout my wordpress blog. I have the url structure set to category/title Most of the 404 errors seem to be that the crawler is looking for a /home.html page. Each time I add a new post I get more 404 errors. I could, of course, add 301 redirects but I presume there is an easy way to do this within the WP setup. Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Using Thesis as blog platform vs. Tumblr
I read a lot of advantages by using Thesis as a platform for blogging, but I like the themes and other plugins from Tumblr. Are there equivalents at Tumblr to the Thesis benefits so I can go a head and go with Tumblr?
Technical SEO | | HyperOffice0