robots directives not showing

  • Resolved digitalquery

    (@digitalquery)


    6 years, 4 months ago

    Hi

    For some reason, robot meta directives aren’t showing up in a theme I’m building.

    If I set noindex and nofollow for a page, what should happen is something like the following is added:

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

    However, this is not being added for some reason – all the other SEO Framework generated meta tags seem to be working fine.

    How can I go about investigating what the conflict is? Is there a hook that is being used to add the robots tag – I’m happy to step through my code and try and find this if you can give me a hint where I could start looking!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    6 years, 4 months ago

    Hello!

    A link to the site in question would be most helpful, so we can quickly spot the issue.
    For future reference, when you create a new topic, you can submit a link that is hidden from logged-out users.

    When it comes to the robots tags not working, these are the only three possible causes I am aware of:

    1. An object caching plugin may be active. It can cause database calls to serve stale information. See if flushing its caches helps.
    2. A page caching plugin may be active. It can cause old versions of pages to be outputted. Again, see if flushing its caches helps.
    3. WordPress discourages search engines from indexing the site. Here, TSF disables its robots metatag. The SEO Bar will exclaim this issue (quite harshly) in red.

    TSF works independently from other integrations in outputting its metatags. So I doubt custom debugging code will ease investigating this issue.

    Any more information you think is useful on this issue will be appreciated! Cheers 🙂

    Thread Starter digitalquery

    (@digitalquery)

    6 years, 4 months ago

    Thanks for the reply.

    I’ve found the problem.

    Somehow, the value of the blog_public option was set to 2 (instead of 0 for private, 1 for public).

    In the is_blog_public() method in core.class.php, you are checking for a value of 1 otherwise you assume the blog is private. I’m wondering if it would be better to test against 0 instead, and return true unless the option value is 0?

    Anwyay, toggling the Discourage search engines from indexing this site setting does set the option value back to 0 and 1, which fixes the issue – thanks for the clue!

    Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    6 years, 4 months ago

    Heh, what I find more curious is how did it even get to 2!?

    WordPress sporadically checks for (bool) true/false, (int) 1, (string) '1', and (string) '0' in its source, without ever type checking. So, I’m not sure what the right path is–something else would break anyway (in your case, the option wasn’t checked?).

    WordPress blog_public option calls

    With that said, we could make our check weaker, which should conform to WordPress’ non-standard 🙂 Thanks for the suggestion!

    I’m glad you’ve found the issue 🙂 Cheers!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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