As you might know, I‘m currently developing my own Blog Network of MFA (dollar-a-day) websites. For my current run, I‘m filling up my web hosting space at GoDaddy with Directories and WordPress Blogs. Yes this time I‘m using WordPress because my SEO Website CMS somehow doesn’t work with the Godaddy accounts since they have some special permissions on htaccess and its rewrite rules. I‘ll try to fix it but currently I don‘t have the time to bother with this and I‘m using WordPress instead.
What I didn‘t know when I used GoDaddy‘s default wordpress installer was that when it installs it it sets up by default “Search Engine Privacy” settings. Those settings forbid Search Engines to index your website and therefore no matter how much efforts you have it won‘t get you indexed. Actually if you knew about this option, its so easy to switch the button and actually disable it and enable search engines to visit your website and actually get indexed, but in most of the cases people don‘t know about it or others (like me for example) don‘t look for it since we all know that the default settings for search engine privacy is disabled on new wordpress installations. That‘s the reason I really got pissed off because GoDaddy decided to change those for you and if you were not careful and did not have the knowledge how to work with search engines you might wonder why your website never got in the Search Engines and you don‘t get any visitors to your new website
I remember that I stumbled on few threads in the Digital Point Forum from people complaining that their wordpress blogs at GoDaddy have PR (Page Rank) but no pages in the Search Engine Index. This exact problem is caused by the search engine privacy option in WordPress because the links that you have towards your blog are giving your PR, but since they can not index it that‘s why the search engine don‘t show any listings.
I guess I got stuck with about 15 web blogs on my GoDaddy Account and they all did not get indexed and I was checking all day to see what happened, but nothing. That‘s why I got really curious and saw that setting. I guess that solved the issue, but this post is supposed to be as a warning to other GoDaddy clients to know what to do with their default wordpress installations if they want to harness the search engine traffic.
My affected blogs were those:
LIST VISIBLE TO REGISTERED USERS ONLY!
Hi Venetsian,
I just came across this post of yours because I also have issues with Godaddy/Search Engine/wordpress. How did you fix this problem exactly? I also signed up with their Search Engine Visibility, and there it shows as if I have no tags on all of my pages, my pages don’t link (like broken links). Do you think that this “tool” should only work properly for normal webpages and not blogs? I got really scared – I mean I signed up there and what if I will never get a good page rank, or good search engine visablilty. Hopefully you could answer some of my questions. Thanks, Judith.
Venetsian,
I just came across your post and wanted to offer some clarification. The quick install of WordPress through Hosting Connection is set to allow your site to be visible to search engines and has been for quite a while. If you still have questions or would like to discuss this, please send me an email.
For Judith, and any other users that come along, changing these settings can be done by using the information found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Privacy_SubPanel