Noindexed my website. Oops.

[wjb316]

Originally this was a post asking why my site has been completely dropped from Google. I thought it was because of a sitewide 301 but I instead realized it was because I failed to flick a certain switch in WordPress's privacy settings after moving the blog from its test location to its new home.

While I was populating the blog with all my content from the old site, I had the blog no-indexed so I wouldn't get hit with a bunch of duplicate content problems. After I made the move, I forgot to remove the noindex tags. Big mistake.

This thread is almost completely worthless but I guess it might help someone out there avoid the same mistake.

[wjb316]

Oh wait. Could it be that when I go to page, view source, I found this nice little piece of code?

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

Awesome. I forgot to go to Settings>Privacy and make my WP blog viewable to everyone after moving it from the test location to the public location.

Other than kicking my dog and deleting the code, is there anything else I should do?

[Prenut]

In WP go to settings, then to privacy. There are two options- to allow robots or not to allow robots.

[wjb316]

Yea, fixed that. I can't believe I did that. I am on a roll this month. First I post non-affiliate links to all my poker sites for a week, then I de-index my entire website.

Now that the offending code has been removed, is there anything else I should do other than wait?

Edit - Did some research instead of asking to be spoonfed. I read that if you accidentally noindex your entire site, Google will bring it back pretty quickly after you remove the tags. Nice.

Learn from my mistakes people!

[TheDonk]

Ugh, sorry to hear it man. If it makes you feel any better, we've all done stupid shit like this before.

[Tom]

Damn that sucks. Hope your rankings stay intact.

[wjb316]

Lol thanks for the kind words. I'm sure it'll come back soon enough.

[Bryan]

If it makes you feel any better, I did this same thing with a non-poker site a couple of years ago. Once I realized my mistake, it only took a day or two for Google to re-index.

[wjb316]

Man I sure hope so. It's not looking good so far. Sonsabitches! I was excited to see the new pages, search rankings and $$.

Oh well, PR went up again. Doesn't really help but it was cool to see it getting back to where it used to be.