WordPress 3.0 New Feature #2 – Prominent Awareness Of Your Blog’s Search Engine Status.

The 2nd new feature in WordPress 3.0 that you will notice, after the 1st one, is the prominent display of the search engine status of your blog / website.

During installation, if you have unchecked the option that allows search engines to index your site and boost your blog’s visibility online, then wordpress will display a “search engines blocked” link prominently on your wordpress dashboard.

I think this is another great feature in WordPress 3.0. The developers seem to have given a lot of thought to user behavior. Almost always, when I setting up a new WordPress site, I block the search engines. Although at first, blocking may seem counter-intuitive to any wordpress blog or website that is going live to be seen and experienced by the world, to me, doing so at the time of install serves a single main purpose

Permlinks (the permanent links / URLS to your blog, website pages) could undergo changes at the initial stage. So if search engines were indexing your site from the beginning, then you run the risk of having broken links in the search index, which in turn could cause 404 Page not found errors.

So I always disable search engines in blogs and websites using both wordpress privacy settings and robots.txt initially, and then when I am satisfied with the link structure and have tested it out, only then do I enable search engines again.

The caveat with this approach of blocking search engines at the beginning is that you may – as I have done more often that I’d like to recall – forget to re-enable the search engines again when everything is good to go.

Not any more!

By prominently displaying the search engines status and also giving you a very easy way to update it  - in just 2 clicks – the wordpress developers have made it hard for you to “forget” to turn on this critical piece in your blog’s lifecycle.

I guess that still leaves the ROBOTS.TXT…. Oh well, may be by WordPress 10.0, Matt would’ve figured out a way to automate that also