One of my side projects that has helped derail this blog is Microblink, a website dedicated to covering microblogging news, available platforms and applications for using them. We have been hard at work publishing new posts daily and spreading the word about the site to our potential audience.
One area we thought we had covered in the promotion of the site was Google, as WordPress does a very good job of pinging the search giant when new posts go live. However, there is one very important setting in your WordPress admin control panel that needs to be addressed if you want Google to find you.
In the control panel under Settings > Privacy, there is a simple radio button question that addresses the visibility of your blog. Essentially, the two options are “I want everyone to see my blog,” and “Please hide my blog from search engines.” The reason someone would choose the second option (and the reason we selected it for Microblink) is for when you are still in the development stages of your WordPress blog.
If you are still making lots of changes and edits to your blog in it’s initial setup, you don’t want Google or Technorati in there indexing your blog with outdated information. Getting everything in line first and then exposing the blog to search engines will make the process much more smooth.
If you don’t change the visibility for your blog when you are ready to launch, it will work against you, as it did for Microblink, because we could never get our description or other information to index in search results. Now, with a single click, we’re back in business and are allowing search engines in to properly index our content.
So, let this be a lesson to those of you working through WordPress in incognito mode.
Once you are ready to launch, be sure to change the privacy option back to full view.
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