CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wordpresssearch-engine
Leon
Leon

Reputation: 2149

Cannot change site visibility in Wordpress

I have a weird issue with a Wordpress site I'm working on. I can't seem to disable the checkbox that says "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" (See screenshot, though it's in Dutch..).

When I disable the checkbox and save the settings, the page reloads and the checkbox is checked again. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this is happening? And is there a way to manually enable search engine visibility?

Thanks!

Screenshot

Upvotes: 4

Views: 3150

Answers (4)

viola_lee
viola_lee

Reputation: 1

This is an old question, but just in case this helps someone:

If the site is hosted as a staging site you won't be able to uncheck the box (depending on your hosting provider, of course). WPengine, for instance, prevents unchecking the box in staging.

This is easy to forget when you're on a deadline for a client site.

Just remember to uncheck the box when you push to production (made that mistake!).

Upvotes: 0

Rauli Rajande
Rauli Rajande

Reputation: 2020

Do you have file mu-plugins/disallow-indexing.php ?

Comment everything out in there (or just empty this).

Upvotes: 0

user3750119
user3750119

Reputation: 1

1: Is WP installed at the site root? (If not, you'll need some .htaccess trickery.)

2: Did you verify that there is no robots.txt file already sitting out there?

Here is an excerpt from http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_Screen :

Causes hits to robots.txt to send back: User-agent: * Disallow: /

Note: The above only works if WordPress is installed in the site root and no robots.txt exists.

Upvotes: 0

Pr3st0ne
Pr3st0ne

Reputation: 11

(I can't post a comment yet because I don't have enough rep, so this isn't really a definite answer) Have you manually looked at your robots.txt? http://yourdomainname.com/robots.txt

Post the result here, maybe there's something manually overwriting it. (Hence it being always checked)

Upvotes: 1

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