WordPress.org

1. smacdonald
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Hi all,

   Last week I set up a WordPress site on an existing server under my company's domain name. The WP site is just a test site, so I set it up in a separate directory on the server. All the pages/posts are temporary and contain placeholder text. I have the 'I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers' setting checked.

   Now if I search for the company's name, my WordPress site appears. This is not at all what I want. As far as I'm aware, there are no links to my test WP site on any other sites out there, or on my company's existing site. If other people search for my company name, they'll be taken to the test site with placeholder text.

   Does WordPress automatically submit itself to Google? If not, how would my site have gotten into the Google index? If WP does automatically submit itself, is this tied to the 'I would like my blog to be visible to everyone' setting I mentioned above? This setting doesn't give any indication that it will cause my site to be automatically submitted; I assumed it would just not disable access via the robots.txt file.

   For the moment I've selected the 'I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors' setting and I'm hurriedly trying to put some real content in my site so that my company's site doesn't look completely unprofessional.

   Thanks!

   Stewart

2. Samuel B
   moderator
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Does WordPress automatically submit itself to Google? If not, how would my site have gotten into the Google index? If WP does automatically submit itself, is this tied to the 'I would like my blog to be visible to everyone' setting I mentioned above?

   google does that on it's own - if you set the blog to be visible, it will be found quickly by googlebot and others

   you will need to create a custom robots.txt to override this behavior
   http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization

3. smacdonald
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Thanks for the reply!

   How did Google find my site when there are no links to it on other sites? Google doesn't request random pages from my server in the hope that they exist. If the Googlebot did that, my error logs would be full of 404 errors.

   I can't see how Google found out about my testing site unless WordPress announced it somehow.

   Thanks again for the reply, but I'm still confused! :)

   Stewart

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