I was glad to see that my site recovered after not too long. Fortunately I wasn’t too dependent on traffic from Google for my business at the time. But after having switched the site to WordPress and getting that privacy setting fixed and occasionally posting things, I’ve seen really favorable results from Google.

Hopefully that will prevent this scenario from happening to other people. Of course, if Fantastico hasn’t been updated on your hosting yet, you may still get the old behavior. So it’s definitely still worth checking your Privacy setting after installing.

Everybody I’ve talked to says Google loves blogs, and my experience has been the same.

Besides the fact that the content is well organized and tends to be updated frequently, by default WordPress pings pingomatic (that is, if you don’t install it through Fantastico), which notifies the search engines that you’ve updated something and usually gets them back to crawl your site for updates.

I have Google Alerts set up to notify me when any new listings show up in Google that contain my business name, and my title tags all contain my business name, so I get notified as soon as any of my posts show up in Google. The last post I made, I got a Google Alert e-mail within 5 minutes. So that means Google got right over there and indexed the new page as soon as it got the ping from pingomatic.

So to me, it sounds like there could be a problem of some sort with your configuration or something. It seems like if you have your privacy settings correct, and as long as these aren’t spam-type sites, that Google should be loving your new sites.

Of course, I’m mainly referring to getting listing. Getting good rankings can take some time. It has a lot to do with the competition for the keywords you’re going after, as well as the quality of incoming links. I don’t think having a WordPress-based site is a magic bullet that’s going to automatically give good rankings or anything, as some people seem to think, but I don’t believe it would hurt either.

I have noticed more and more spammy blogs popping up, so it’s possible Google might get a little more skeptical of new sites until they prove themselves. But I haven’t had any issues with sites not getting indexed or anything.

If you have some WordPress-based sites that aren’t getting indexed, I’d be glad to take a look at them for you to see if I can spot anything that might be causing issues.

Oh, one other possibility that could potentially be an issue is over-pinging. I don’t actually know if this is something to worry about or not, but I know there are plugins out there to keep your site from pinging too often.

My understanding is that WordPress sends a ping every time you click the Update button on a page/post. If you’re just setting up a page or post on a new site and are trying to tweak things, that can sometimes mean hitting Update every couple minutes and then looking at the site to see how it looks. If it’s sending a ping every time, it can look like you’re sending too many pings.

As I mentioned, I really don’t know what impact that can have. The maker of one of the plugins that prevents over-pinging claims it can get your site blocked, but I really don’t know firsthand. I usually don’t worry about it personally, but if I knew I was going to be making tons of updates, I might install the plugin.

Just some thoughts. Again, I’d be glad to look at any sites you’re having trouble with to see if I can help you find the cause.

My past websites with traditional html coding would get excellent search engine ranking and even older sites still exist on first and second page searches. This all ended when I started putting sites together with wordpress. With wordpress my site does not come up in good ranking no matter how many pages or keywords are added. It seems google is configured to avoid blog style pages, and mainly refer to these in blogsearch.google.com But how many people really use blogsearch.google?

I think it would be nice for Fantastico to give you the option of blocking search engines or not, though. Or at the very least let you know it’s doing that.

I was used to installing WordPress manually and WordPress currently gives you an option when you install it as to whether you want to block search engines or not. I may be mistaken, but I think that’s fairly new. I believe it used to just allow search engines to crawl the site by default.

Anyway, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that Fantastico blocks search engines by default. My problem with it is that they are altering the default installation settings for WordPress without notifying you.

Inexperienced users who are trying to get started blogging, hoping to get some traffic from search engines, are not going to know there is even a setting that controls this and probably aren’t going to be poking around in settings they don’t understand. A simple checkbox during the installation would be nice.

I wonder why people don’t even look at every settings pages, there aren’t many.