Just made a rookie mistake

by Danny Cutts

Posted: 11 years ago 10 replies

I recently moved a site from a free sitebuilder solution to wordpress for friend/client of mine and we pretty much already dominate the niche but traffic had been tumbling so I thought it was a google slap and so I decided to dive deep into the analytics and what not.

I also put it on webmaster tools.... which is something I do as standard anyway :-)

Well tonight I was cruising about GWT and saw a notification for this site... I was like whoops whats happened here....

Well it turns out the my sitemap.xml was blocking the google bot.... FFS

A quick check and in wordpress for some reason (beats me) the "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" was checked

Whoops.... I am not saying it matters as our google rankings have been pretty good but it could not have helped the cause.....

Just goes to show we all make mistakes and over sites.... Glad I found it rather than someone else....lol

Danny

#made #mistake #rookie

Matt Morgan 11 years ago

We all make mistakes, we learn from them. Even the Top marketers have made mistakes along their journeys.

Mistakes in wordpress and google are nothing to be ashamed of as it takes a learning curve.

Keep working at it, towards your jur-kneeto success.

Oops, i made a spelling mistake in RED above......hehe
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MartinPlatt 11 years ago

Oops. It usually doesn't matter, other than the earnings for the period that you lose. Usually rankings come back pretty quickly.

I've had a few occasions where I don't know a stray plugin or something causes something to get screwed up in Wordpress, and the way to fix it is to resave the permalink structure. That took al of my posts off of my site.

I need to find a decent site pinging software. I was using one, but it started spamming me when there was nothing wrong with the site, so got rid. Need one again now

The site had any other problems after moving it?
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BrianCampbelldotcom 11 years ago

Of all the mistakes that you can make, this was a fairly minor one. Some people are even suspicious of whether or or not that setting makes a difference. It probably does make a difference, but now that you have it set correctly the problem will resolve.

Google will come back to the site & see some more great content and then the bots will notice that you want to be indexed again. Google will add you back into their database & you're rankings should improve
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Kevin Maguire 11 years ago

Danny
You should really Hire yourself an "SEO Expert" to look after that sort of thing for you. jk
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Danny Cutts 11 years ago

lol thanks :-)

I dont have a problem with SEO :-) Just a little oversight...lol

You all ready for the Big G update that the industry is waiting for?

Danny
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smodha 11 years ago

How is that possible? This option is disabled when you install WP.
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- yukon Banned 11 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by smodha
  
  How is that possible? This option is disabled when you install WP.
  
  Not always.
  
  I remember about a year ago Hostgator was checking that noindex box in the WP Admin. by default, when WP was installed via Fantastico on the Cpanel.
  
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Danny Cutts 11 years ago

When I moved the site to WP I build it on separate domain and them move it over when its ready... so I select that option to just give it a chance of not being indexed...

It means that the site wont be down for any period of time :-)
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bussix 11 years ago

Happens to the best Danny! Might even be that we're getting older and more forgetful
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- Danny Cutts 11 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by bussix
  
  Happens to the best Danny! Might even be that we're getting older and more forgetful
  
  Yep very true :-)
  
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