Stupid, Stupid, Stupid! I Just Found Out Why My Sites Weren't Being Indexed by Google

I had set the privacy settings in Wordpress to "Open to visitors, but closed to search engines".

There. That little thing probably cost me $1k/month.

By default, all my wordpress blogs used to be open to everyone, search engines included. Now they're all closed to search engines by default, which, of course, makes indexing them rather impossible. Some plugin must've triggered this change in the default settings.

(If you don't understand what I'm talking about, go to 'Settings -> Privacy' in your wordpress admin panel. You'll see that there are two options. On my blogs, option 2 (closed to search engines) had been selected by default).

So while I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out why my sites have got just one page indexed in Google after more than a month and hundreds of backlinks, I overlooked this single tiny aspect that made my sites inaccessible to all spiders.

I suggest that you guys check out your Wordpress blog's privacy settings too to see if they aren't blocking spiders.