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
-
Blocked jquery in Robots.txt, Any SEO impact?
I've heard that Google is now indexing links and stuff available in javascript and jquery. My webmastertools is showing that some links are blocked in robots.txt of jquery. Sorry I'm not a developer or designer. I want to know is there any impact of this on my SEO? and also how can I unblock it for the robots? Check this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/3VDWikC.png
Technical SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
Quality Issues: My blog is blocked on Google Search Engine
Hi Webmasters, I got an email from google team. The email is included below. **Google Webmaster Tools: Quality Issues on http://abcdblogger.com/**August 8, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://abcdblogger.com/, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see ourWebmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team My blog is completely blocked on Google Search engine. I removed all existing posts and reinstalled a fresh version of wordpress and wrote a good article. I redirected all broken links my homepage with a 301. After making those changes I submitted a reconsideration request to Google, But they declined it. I doubt that the reason for blocking could be due to the backlinks pointing to my domain. I think Google's Disavow Tool help me to remove low quality backlinks, But how can I sort low quality backlinks using Opensite Explorer? If possible can you create a text file with all possible low quality links, So that I could submit it using Google Disavow Tool. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | hafiskani0 -
Blog article URL - with or without date?
Quick question to all you folks: does including the date in a blog article's permalink affect rankings? For example, here's an article with the month and year, as well as the blog title: http://www.ayzanyc.com/blog/2012/12/difference-between-hot-chocolate-hot-cocoa/ Is it better to omit the date and just put the blog title? Also, if is better to avoid using the date, is it worth it to change the link structure of our previous articles (given that the URL will now be different), or should we just focus on future articles? Thanks ahead of time for your advice.
Technical SEO | | onurkiyak0 -
Putting blog excerpts in footer of every page?
I have roughly 150 non-blog pages and 500 articles in my blog. The footer of every non-blog page includes excerpts from 3 blog posts selected at random from the inventory of 500. The posts in the footer of each page change with every page refresh. So, if you scroll to the bottom of any non-blog page, you'll see about 85 words for each of 3 randomly selected blog posts, with a link to the source article in the blog section of my site. Each page will link to 3 different posts. One of my objectives is to drive visitors to some older blog content that has become buried deep in the archives over the years. Question 1: In a post-Panda/Penguin world, is this a good or bad technique? Question 2: Should the links to the full content in the blog use rel="nofollow"? Without it, the internal link structure for this part of the site looks pretty crazy and random - I assume nofollow would help make things look more orderly (and prevent my main non-blog pages from passing excess link juice to my blog). Thoughts or comments?
Technical SEO | | ahirai0 -
Wordpress Category Archives
Wordpress question here. Can anyone tell me if there is an SEO advantage to creating a page filtered to show results from an individual category as opposed to simply linking to the category archive? The content is identical in both cases.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
I am trying to block robots from indexing parts of my site..
I have a few websites that I mocked up for clients to check out my work and get a feel for the style I produce but I don't want them indexed as they have lore ipsum place holder text and not really optimized... I am in the process of optimizing them but for the time being I would like to block them. Most of my warnings and errors on my seomoz dashboard are from these sites and I was going to upload the folioing to the robot.txt file but I want to make sure this is correct: User-agent: * Disallow: /salondemo/ Disallow: /salondemo3/ Disallow: /cafedemo/ Disallow: /portfolio1/ Disallow: /portfolio2/ Disallow: /portfolio3/ Disallow: /salondemo2/ is this all i need to do? Thanks Donny
Technical SEO | | Smurkcreative0 -
Duplicate Content Caused By Blog Filters
We are getting some duplicate content warnings based on our blog. Canonical URL's can work for some of the pages, but most of the duplicate content is caused by blog posts appearing on more than 1 URL. What is the best way to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Marketpath0