In the previous week a desperate new client came to me with a huge SEO problem (viewed from his eyes). More precisely, the client owned a WP site for a while now, like 1 year. After all this time, the google search engine hasn’t indexed even one page. Even if you type the site domain in google, there was still no corresponding results. So, something was something very wrong on this site.
First thing that I checked was the robots.txt file. Surprisingly it was everything OK in this file. So where is the problem, I asked myself… I tried to generate a sitemap with an online tool, which returned zero results. My next deduction was, that something is blocking the spiders on the server side. So I tried to open the site in linux console (wget http://example.com). Again, there was nothing wrong here, the page downloaded successfully, with the right content. OK, lets see if the online free sollutions can help me, I said, and asked for help an online SEO analyzer tool, which again didn’t helped me.
When I was almost desperate, I went reading the entire source code of the website… And caboooom… there it was…. the line which was causing the problem.
<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />
Immediately I went to the header.php file, where this line was located, but there was no such line. Well, then there must be an option in wordpress to manage this evil line. which caused so much problems to this client. After opening the wp-admin, I found it immediately:
Settings
-> Reading
-> Search Engine Visibility
[Uncheck the checkbox "Discourage search engines from indexing this site"]
I hope that this article will help someone, who will have the same problem. Cheers!
