I have been toiling for the past week with SEO and promotion for my blog. And also last week, I discovered that there was an invisible robots.txt that blocked all search engines. I promptly replaced it with an empty robots.txt (I say it's invisible because you couldn't see it with an FTP client, but when you type the URL to it, it loads).
So that was a week ago, and since then I have been waiting for my website to be indexed, and I have become frustrated with the wait not knowing what else I can do to promote the site online.
I use the Revolution theme by Brian Gardner, and I remember noticing a nofollow something in the header, so just out of suspicion, I search Google for "revolution theme SEO" and I find Is the Revolution theme anti-SEO??? : Support. In one of the posts inside this thread I read:
Do you have a list of Ping services setup in the Admin panel? (Settings > Writing) If you can't see this then you have your Privacy setting to block the search engines turned on (Settings > Privacy).
I check the Privacy settings, and, indeed, it is set to block all search engines and crawlers! Now, I'm angry that this was set to ON by someone, but also relieved because I know exactly why my site is not being indexed.
I really wonder why WordPress came with this setting turned ON. I did use GoDaddy's automatic WordPress install service...Could that be the reason?
