Wordpress Tip - Did You Want Google To Index That?

Many people know that there is no better SEO friendly blogging platform than Wordpress but No matter how good a new Wordpress blog is, it won't likely get indexed if the sitemap is restricted by robots.txt! I meandered by Google Webmaster Tools to check on a client's indexing progress, then decided to check the status of the sitemap where I saw a dreaded red X! and the message "restricted by robots.txt" meaning Google wasn't allowed to look at my sitemap, and perhaps not the entire website. Robots.txt is a file that asks that some content such as contact forms or other pages intended to serve as modules on main pages not be indexed by Google. It is also a choice in Wordpress to block the entire site. It's important to use this feature when building a new site so that Google doesn't come along before you're ready and index "Hello World!" as the primary keywords of your site.

I'm not saying when or who but I once knew of a website that got indexed during the build phase and for a month, the phone number was displayed in Google search results as 000-000-0000! Not good, so keeping Google at bay is a good option under certain circumstances.

On the other hand, it doesn't pay to be asleep at the switch like I was, waiting for Google to finally do it's thing while I hadn't done mine.

For those who use Wordpress.

In the Dashboard:

1. Choose Privace under the Settings menu tab.

2. Choose your option. This sets up robots.txt to open or close the gateway to search engines.