Meta Tag Robots Issue – A Lesson In Logical Thinking

14 January 2010 137 views One Comment

Recently I had an issue with the site, where the following meta tag seemed to suddenly appear in my header.

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”

The result of this new code was that google (and other search engines) stopped crawling my site and all external links form my site carried no SEO value. Obviously this was detrimental to the site and I needed to fix the issue immediately.

What I Did

So instead of dissecting the source of this new code I just jumped on in and tried to remove it. Here is a step by step guide of what I did wrong

Viewed the header file to remove the code. Could not find the code.
Added my own robots meta tag with index, follow. Needless to say that did not work.
Noticed a php wp_head in the header code. Tried to edit the file to no avail. (On a side note it took me a while to find the code, wp_head can be found at wp-includes > general-template.php > line 1132)
Luckily stumbled upon the solution in a forum

What Needed To Be Done

If I thought about this logically it would of only taken 2 minutes to fix. I should have asked why did the code suddenly appear? I recently reinstalled the newest version of wordpress. And what happens when you do that? It resets to its default settings. And what default setting affects search engine robots? The privacy settings.

So to solve this issue is an incredible simple fix. Go to Admin area > Settings > Privacy > select “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” > save. Problem solved.

I wrote this article to teach you two things. One was to show you how to remove this tag, META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” from your wordpress header. The other is a lesson in logical problem solvng. If I had taken a few minutes to consider the issue (particularly what could have caused it to begin with) logic would have led me the solution much faster and saved me a lot of time.