How to change noindex to index?
-
Hey,
I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.'
How can i change this so my pages get indexed?
I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated..
Please let me know
Many thanks, Jamie
P.s Im using WordPress 3.5
And i have the XML sitemap plugin
And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
-
Answered below as well, but wanted to drop this here in case anyone else is looking. WP has changed the location of what used to be "Privacy" under settings. The functionality (which blocks search engines from your wordpress installation) is now under Settings->Reading
[Screenshot](Hi Mark Did you find it? I struggled too for a bit, but it's moved to Settings->Reading See this screenshot -Dan)
-Dan
-
Hi Mark
Did you find it? I struggled too for a bit, but it's moved to Settings->Reading
-Dan
-
Just updated it to this: http://gyazo.com/4a8a008055abbd563f96bf29b6b259a6.png?1357651763
And then checked my page sources and they're still 'noindex' - why can't i correct this?!
-
Just installed it and now its added this field into my settings>Reading
http://gyazo.com/0be601793fc1cb866d918ea61e7d8ec1.png?1357649141
What do i need to change to allow it to index all my pages?
(Don't want to type something in that will block all my pages )
-
Just asked the WordPress Forums and one of their reply was to install this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-robots-txt/
Just seems to add the privacy tab again so i can set the settings to: I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers
Like you first stated
Will install it now and see how it goes
-
It could be that the older wordpress had a setting that this new version has decided to ignore. This is typical of programmers!
The next possibility is to look in the database, but the options part of the database is hard to read.
Another idea is to look in the code of the the theme and hack it, so it is permanently index, follow or just remove that altogether.
Maybe someone else has a better idea?
Alan
-
If i remember correctly my pages were still not being indexed before i installed the all in one SEO pack.
Here is my settings for the SEO pack: http://gyazo.com/6b4dddacb307bdacfdd7741894e0356b.png?1357647136
As you can see they are as you explained.
Any other ideas?
-
Yes, I would have them indexed in that case too.
I think it is the categories that are noindex.
I think this is an 'All in one SEO pack' adjustable feature.
In the setup for that, look for a checkbox:
"use noindex for categories"
uncheck that if it is checked.
If that isn't it, I don't know the answer
-
Thanks again for your reply Alan.
Currently the site is still in its final stages of development and once my automated system is finally built and implemented then I won't need to be changing any of the index pages except posting a few blogs once in a week or so.
So i think it would benefit me more to have each of my index pages getting indexed but then again I'm not sure on how to go about allowing them to be indexed due to WordPress' update.
My plugins are all highly downloaded and i use the 'All in one SEO pack' - if that may be the problem? I've gone through all the settings and the noindex buttons are all anticked.
Perhaps it could be the initial theme i used?
-
Thank you Mark
Nice looking site!
Your front page is index, follow.
Index pages are noindex, follow
Final pages are index, follow
I do something very close to this on my site.
Often, index pages are useless to searchers, because the index page changes so quickly that by the time the info gets into a search result, the information is no longer on that page, and the searcher will either just click away, cursing you and your site, or they will go looking through a few index pages and then curse you when they can't find what they wanted.
So I agree with the way you're doing that - if it is the case that the content changes quickly. If the index pages are just collectors of groups of items, then index, follow would be better, provided that you have enough text on the page to make it worthwhile.
As to how to make that happen, it isn't obvious.
I need to upgrade some of my sites to 3.5.
It could be that you have a plugin or a "custom field" that sets the index follow.
I suggest you edit a post and a page and scroll down to see if you have a field that handles it, such as "robotsmeta" that is set to "noindex,follow" for those pages
-
Hi Alan, thanks for your quick response.
My website is: www.FifaCoinStore.com
Here is a printscreen of my settings: http://gyazo.com/0cd3d21c5ec1797873a5c7cacc85a588.png?1357600674
I believe since the WordPress 3.5 update they have removed this privacy option which is why i can't seem to find it. I read this page from WordPress on it: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_Screen
Or am i just looking in the wrong place?
Thanks again
-
Hello Mark.
Please send me a bitly shortened link to your website so I can see what you are seeing
It probably isn't your robots file.
First try this.
In the Admin section, you should see "Settings" on the left navigation
Click that and you should see "Privacy"
Click that and you should see two radio buttons
<label for="blog-public">I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers</label>
<label for="blog-norobots">I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors</label>
Obviously, choose the top one and save it.
Then, refresh your front page or inner pages and look in the code to see if it still says noindex
If you have a cache, you will need to flush it.
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
-
Permalink change
what will happen with the old permalink when we change the title name to a new title name? would the old permalink disappear after a while or i have to manually delete them? thank you
Technical SEO | | gergi0 -
Https - should I do change of address on WMT
We have added a SSL cert to our site - Should I submit change of address on WMT and submit a new sitemap from the http?
Technical SEO | | webguru20140 -
Https indexed...how?
Hello Moz, Since a while i am struggling with a SEO case: At the moment a https version of a homepage of a client of us is indexed in Google. Thats really strange because the url is redirected to an other website url for three weeks now. And we did everything to make clear to google that he has to index the other url.
Technical SEO | | Searchresult
So we have a few homepage urls A https://www.website.nl
B https://www.websites.nl/category
C http://www.websites.nl/category What we did: Redirected A with a 301 to B, a redirect from A or B to C is difficult because of the security issue with the ssl certificate. We put the right canonical url (VERSION C) on every version of the homepage(A,B) We only put the canonical urls in the sitemap.xml, only version C and uploaded it to Google Webmastertools We changed all important internal links to Version C We also get some valuable external backlinks to Version C Is there something i missed or i forget to say to Google hey look you've got the wrong url indexed, you have to index version C? How is it possible Google still prefers Version A after doing al those changes three weeks a go? I'am really looking forward to your answer. Thanks a lot in advanced! Greetz Djacko0 -
Pages not being indexed
Hi Moz community! We have a client for whom some of their pages are not ranking at all, although they do seem to be indexed by Google. They are in the real estate sector and this is an example of one: http://www.myhome.ie/residential/brochure/102-iveagh-gardens-crumlin-dublin-12/2289087 In the example above if you search for "102 iveagh gardens crumlin" on Google then they do not rank for that exact URL above - it's a similar one. And this page has been live for quite some time. Anyone got any thoughts on what might be at play here? Kind regards. Gavin
Technical SEO | | IrishTimes0 -
Spam posts indexed, what to do now?
Hi, So we had a staff problem last week and we let some spam posts (cheap nike jerseys etc.) that also got indexed by Google. (We just checked and there are lik 105 already indexed) Of course we have now removed all these spam posts but what is the best practice at this point? Are we supposed to do something else to remove these from Google's index? (maybe through google webmaster tools?) We have already edited robots.txt to disallow those pages as a quick remedy. And finally, could this have done any harm? We were quite slow noticing these posts to remove them. They were there for about 12 days. thanks
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
Why hasn't my sites indexed on opensiteexplorer.org changed in weeks?
Why hasn't my sites indexed on opensiteexplorer.org changed in weeks, even though I've done link-building like crazy?
Technical SEO | | AccountKiller0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860 -
Existing Pages in Google Index and Changing URLs
Hi!! I am launching a newly recoded site this week and had a another noobie question. The URL structure has changed slightly and I have installed a 301 redirect to take care of that. I am wondering how Google will handle my "old" pages? Will they just fall out of the index? Or does the 301 redirect tell Google to rewrite the URLs in the index? I am just concerned I may see an "old" page and a "new" page with the same content in the index. Just want to make sure I have covered all my bases. Thanks!! Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0