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Thanks for your response Joel.

Its always been a grey area for me. Some forums seem to only exist for links, which I clearly try to disregard, but I wonder why such a high profile website would allow this in a comment section. Oversight on the behalf of the webmasters perhaps?

Hi all,

This will probably be a fairly simple question, however I'm unsure of the correct terminology to get a good answer via search.

Some of my competitors have links in the comment section of highly respected websites, example of one occurrence on the mighty Wired:

http://www.wired.com/bodyhack/2007/07/good-green/

Since Panda and Penguin I know Google has attempted to disregard any sort of link juice from such comment/forum spam - is this the case with comment links in sites such as Wired, as above?

I'd like to hear that such comment spam actually harms the ranking of competitor sites..is there any truth to this also?

I want to avoid all sorts of spammy approaches to SEO such as this - I've always been an ethical marketer, and would rather not stoop to these levels...but if they work and there is no chance of ranking penalisation..

Thanks for your time, dudes!

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

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

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!