Do NOT NoIndex Your Home Page... EVER!
- SEO |
Years back I bought a domain after my own name. Mostly so that I could have an email address that both began and ended in my name.
About two years ago I threw wordpress up on it, thinking I'd do a regular old blog talking about what I was interested in and stuff. Threw up one post, and then never did anything with it.
Over the last two years though, I would always sign my comment posts on other sites with my real name and anchor it back to my homepage. My thought was that if I ever became famous, I'd want to be sitting at #1 on Google for my name, ready and waiting for the time when I got interviewed on Orpah.
Cool thing was, that just from that little effort my site was a PR2.
I decided to get more serious with the blog this month, ripped wordpress down and installed Wordpress MU (for structure, not so others can blog on my site).
For whatever reason, when MU installed, it set the privacy settings for the MAIN blog (which is the homepage) to block search engines. This sticks a nice, fat "NoIndex" in the header of the home page.
I was weirded out one day when I noticed that my PR was gone. Then I checked google to find out that all the pages in my site were indexed EXCEPT my home page. I discovered the problem and fixed it...but now that the home page is re-indexed, it still has zero PR.
...or maybe I'm wrong and the PR is still there and it will show again after the next PR update?
About two years ago I threw wordpress up on it, thinking I'd do a regular old blog talking about what I was interested in and stuff. Threw up one post, and then never did anything with it.
Over the last two years though, I would always sign my comment posts on other sites with my real name and anchor it back to my homepage. My thought was that if I ever became famous, I'd want to be sitting at #1 on Google for my name, ready and waiting for the time when I got interviewed on Orpah.
Cool thing was, that just from that little effort my site was a PR2.
I decided to get more serious with the blog this month, ripped wordpress down and installed Wordpress MU (for structure, not so others can blog on my site).
For whatever reason, when MU installed, it set the privacy settings for the MAIN blog (which is the homepage) to block search engines. This sticks a nice, fat "NoIndex" in the header of the home page.
I was weirded out one day when I noticed that my PR was gone. Then I checked google to find out that all the pages in my site were indexed EXCEPT my home page. I discovered the problem and fixed it...but now that the home page is re-indexed, it still has zero PR.
...or maybe I'm wrong and the PR is still there and it will show again after the next PR update?
I'm currently taking MASSIVE action...