Do I have to start over?

[Asher]

I have a client of which we put up an extensive responsive landing page with a blog in the backend, this was done with Worpress.

Over the new years, our web developer pushed the new site live without telling me, and left the privacy settings on (meaning: please ask search engines not to index this site).

The robots.txt I had set up was set up so that the site would be crawled weekly.  The site had privacy settings on for 9 days (more than a week, ugh!). Thereby, taking away all the SEO work I had done prior and basically starting with a brand new slate.

My question: Do I need to start over with all the seo, or do I need to continue pushing forward and waiting for them to come back up?  Either way, still need to do work, but I want to really know if my prior work has become moot.  Thanks for your replies.

[BedeFahey]

Ugh, leaving the privacy settings on for WordPress is always frustrating.

I don't think you have to redo anything. The site will eventually be re-crawled (which you might be able to speed up with some smart link building), and I don't think you'll have lost anything when that happens. If there were links in place, they're still in place, and the SEO work you've done on-page will still retain its value.

It might just take a bit of time for the whole site to get re-indexed again (of course, if it was never indexed then you have nothing to worry about). I wouldn't worry about the robots.txt crawl rate, it gets ignored anyway.

[danatanseo]

No, in my opinion, you don't need to start over. I've seen worse things happen and still have the site rank fairly quickly and well. Just adjust the settings so that google and other engines can now crawl the site and submit the sitemap via GWT. Other than a temporary bump in the road, I don't think it's going to have a long-term impact on your SEO.

Hope that helps!

Dana

[Asher]

Appreciated, I thought along the same lines but wanted to make sure I was correct.  Thanks for the answer

[Asher]

Site was indexed for 3 months and ranking fairly well, and then privacy settings happened, lost all the rankings.  Oh well.  So keep on trucking.  Thanks for the answer.

[danatanseo]

You are welcome. I hope all goes well.