Are private posts visible to search engines?

Search engines SHOULD respect the industry standard robots.txt file which you could use to block access to a post type. Such as blocking access to anything under example.com/deals. You could also go above and beyond and check the $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] for bots. Something like: $bot_list = array(“Teoma”, “alexa”, “froogle”, “Gigabot”, “inktomi”, “looksmart”, “URL_Spider_SQL”, “Firefly”, “NationalDirectory”, “Ask … Read more

Does is_user_logged_in() block search bots?

If you wrap some content in a is_user_logged_in() condition, all that content will only be rendered to users who have an account on your website and are logged into that account. Now, do Google bots have an account on your website? Hell no. So no, that content will never be indexed by Google in your … Read more

Display title for search engine visitors

I just ran a test on my hosted dev site. I ran the following: echo ‘<pre>’; global $wpdb; print_r($wpdb); print_r($GLOBALS); echo ‘</pre>’; There was no ‘wp_query’, ‘[q]’, or ‘search’ variables to be found. Note that I was not able to search this through a search engine as it’s not web accessible. Just to give you … Read more

How to publish page that can’t be detected by search engines?

How about something like this on your functions.php: add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘no_robots_on_uncategorized_posts’); function no_robots_on_uncategorized_posts() { if(in_category(‘uncategorized’)) { wp_no_robots(); } } This will output the following line of code on the header of your ‘uncategorized’ posts: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” /> What this means is that even though search engines will see the page, they will be told to … Read more

Noindex, nofollow stuck on homepage

The setting is stored in the options table under the key blog_public, the value is either 0 or 1. You can see the value of all options by manually visiting the page /wp-admin/options.php. A quick way to get rid of it would be to remove the noindex action hooked to wp_head, which is what outputs … Read more

How to improve WordPress search

WordPress › Relevanssi – A Better Search « WordPress Plugins Key features: Search results sorted in the order of relevance, not by date. Fuzzy matching: match partial words, if complete words don’t match. Find documents matching either just one search term (OR query) or require all words to appear (AND query). Search for phrases with … Read more