Search Engine visibility in WordPress

By Matt Woicik|2021-05-02T17:09:20-07:00April 13th, 2015|Categories: Websites|

I was thinking that with a test WordPress website, it would be a good idea to make sure it wasn’t indexed by the search engines. So, I did some research and here are my steps:

Login into WordPress admin
Settings –> Reading
Check “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”
Save changes

To test changes, I went to http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/analyzer/ and it said the file didn’t exist. The file doesn’t but the WordPress documentation said it should response.

After reading another article, I decided the better course of action is to not use the WordPress setting and just create an actual robots.txt file.

I created a file called robots.txt with the content below and uploaded it to the root of the website.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Research web pages:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_Screen

http://wpshout.com/never-ever-check-discourage-search-engines/

About the Author: Matt Woicik

Matt is a digital marketing strategist and the owner of ML2 Solutions, a digital marketing agency. He helps businesses increase awareness and get more leads using digital marketing. New marketing methods are confusing, always changing and difficult to figure out. Matt helps to explain things and provide solutions with clear results.