Wordpress Blog Blocked by Metarobots

[paj1979]

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!

[Zachary_Russell]

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

[StalkerB]

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.

[paj1979]

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

[paj1979]

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

[StalkerB]

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?

[paj1979]

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