WordPress Web Design and SEO Tip


Posted: August 23rd, 2008 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Rants, SEO Tactics, Web Design | No Comments

Here’s a big tip if you plan to use WordPress as a CMS for your website, particularly if you’re working off of a fresh installation of WordPress:

As you might know, I recently redesigned the EndGame Public Relations website, moving it from being html-based to php-based and using WordPress as its content management system (CMS).  The site was ranking extremely well for the keywords I targeted, falling in the top five on Google and Yahoo for all of them.  Shortly after the redesign, however, I found that every time Google re-indexed my site, a few more of my pages would disappear from the rankings for my keywords.  I figured they would return shortly and made a few moves to speed up the process.

After two weeks of wondering when my site would return to the rankings, I finally figured out the problem.  WordPress was blocking Google and other search engines from actually SEEING my site!  By default, WordPress is set to full privacy mode.  What this means is that your website will be accessible on the web, but Google and other search engines will be blocked by a file called robots.txt.  This “robots” file tells the search engine spiders which pages they should and should not crawl.  It can be useful at times, but in my case it was a massive SEO roadblock in my website redesign plans.

So, if you build a new site using WordPress, or you convert a site like I did, when you’re done go into your WordPress panel, go to settings, select privacy settings, and make sure it’s set so that everyone can see you … including the search engines.  WordPress will then automatically remove the roadblocks from your robots.txt file.

FYI, if you read this and realize you made the same mistake I did, here’s what you can do: First, download a WordPress plugin called Google Sitemaps Generator.  It generates a sitemap in Google’s preferred format, and then notifies the search engines that the sitemap has been updated.  Once you’ve done that, go to Google Webmaster Tools and make sure Google knows your sitemap is there.  Those webmaster tools are quite helpful, letting you know when your site was last crawled and if there were any troubles.  In fact, my check over there was what finally led me to figure out why my rankings were in the toilet!

[Edited to add on 8/25: My rankings are starting to creep back to where they were! Huzzah!]

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