Traffic has dropped off a cliff

[KeriMorgret]

Ahh, I found a robots noindex,nofollow on your home page and at least one internal. That would do it!

There should be a setting in Wordpress that asks if you want your blog to be private/ not indexed by the search engines. Did that setting stay checked after you went live by chance?

[StreetwiseReports]

thanks for the reply

are google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?

yes, i have a warning in my webmaster account that states robots are being blocked by this code: User-agent: *
Disallow: /

but i have no idea how to change that in wordpress

[StreetwiseReports]

thanks, yes, i see it on Yoast, but it is set to Allow

[KeriMorgret]

Take a look under settings (not via Yoast, but just regular WP settings) and privacy and make sure that your blog is not set to private.

Also, if you've paid someone a bunch of money to redesign your site, they should really have taken better care than to leave the noindex,nofollow on afterwards. You might want to drop them a note saying they did you a major disservice.

[Boodreaux]

I am getting ready to add WordPress too and change some url's. My understanding is that redirects are only necessary if you have links on those pages....is that correct?

[KeriMorgret]

The redirects are necessary for pages that are indexed in the search engines (so people coming from a search result can get to the right page) and for pages that are linked, bookmarked, etc. You generally want to make sure that most pages you change get a redirect.

[StreetwiseReports]

wow, that's confusing! I was just assuming Yoast was the gatekeeper of the robots, but that's not the case. Your right, in my privacy settings it was set to block! Thanks a lot!

[Ecreativeworks]

It looks like you may be telling Google to ignore your site via noindex nofollow. There are two possible places this could be set:

In the Yoast plugin you can tell it how you want the robots to behave: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#robots-meta  You want it to check both Index and Follow.

Similarly in Wordpress itself there is an option under Settings > Privacy. You want to check I want my blog to be visible to everyone.

[KeriMorgret]

I just looked in Google for your site and it looks like it's indexed again. Hope everything is recovering quickly for you! I'd suggest running a campaign in SEOmoz for that site (if you haven't yet) to pick up any duplicate content issues and other suggestions that we have that can further help your site.

[StreetwiseReports]

yes, thanks for the follow up. I have already done that and am awaiting results. thanks again