WordPress, How Tos, Security

During setup in the newer versions of WordPress, you are asked whether you want to let search engines see your blog, or just regular users. This is, IMHO, a very misleading question.

You might indeed want search engines to find your blog — after you get it set up completely. But not knowing the real meaning of this option, you say “yes” to search engines, and unbeknownst to you, WordPress is now going to notify Ping-O-Matic every single time you make a post to your blog! Yes, even your test posts and that silly “Hello World!” post (if you edit or update it).

Personally, my first assumption would be that the question about search engines would insert or leave out robots.txt tags, create or modify the robots.txt file, or something of that nature — since the robots.txt file and tags are directly related to search engines, and keeping them out or letting them in.

As a new blogger, or even moreso as someone setting up a content management system, the concept behind Ping-O-Matic (and update services in general) may be completely unknown. And furthermore, it has nothing to do (at least not directly) with search engines. So asking this question, in this manner, at set up is misleading to say the least.

This question should read “Do you want to automatically inform Ping-O-Matic of new posts to your blog? (If you choose YES, your site may be indexed immediately, even your test posts. You can change this option later in Options –> Privacy.)” since that is exactly what your answer to the question will determine. It should also tell you (or present a link to find out more) about pinging, and the actual results of setting this option to YES.

If you don’t want your new blog (and any test posts you make) immediately crawled by Yahoo! and other search engines, then say NO to this option during set up, or turn it off as soon as you get into Admin for the first time, before you blog about anything…or even update (edit) the Hello World! test post.

Leave a Reply