Search Engines Blocked despite privacy allowing them?

  • So.

    In late April our hosting was hacked. This hacking never reached our site, but i assume others. They then upgraded our version of WordPress automatically. Due to our many custom plugins, we cannot upgrade, so this severely messed our site up. We asked them to restore the site to its previous version and state, and they did, and recommended Cloudflare be installed too.

    As soon as the site was back and Cloudflare installed, we started going down in Google ranks quite severely, as well as our homepage becoming de-indexed.

    Currently, the top of our WordPress page says “Search engines blocked”, despite our privacy settings allowing everyone to view it. This message also ONLY appears on our “posts” page. It goes away if I look at users or plugins for example.

    I am wondering why I am still being told search engines are being blocked when they are not. Im not sure if Cloudflares involvement in this is anything more than co-incidence, but the fact is our ranking and traffic plummeted.

    Any ideas?

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)

  • What is your URL?

    Thread Starter Cheg

    (@cheg)

    gamingclimax.com

    Thread Starter Cheg

    (@cheg)

    Anything?

    Doesn’t appear to be blocked – https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/gamingclimax.com

    Also shows up fine in Google.

    Google will blacklist sites that redirect to spam sites, try to install malicious software, or have spam ads, all of which can be the result of a hack. Once you’re blacklisted, you need to manually apply for it to be removed through webmaster tools, https://webmaster.google.com.

    That said, there is no reason a custom plugin should prevent upgrades. I end up making one off plugins for many client sites, but if you follow best practices and don’t hack core, write scalable code, etc, there is no reason you can’t upgrade. If you didn’t, and by custom plugins you mean you modified their files and/or core WordPress files, then I’m sorry, there’s not much that can be done. Either you hired an inexperienced developer or made some short term decisions without thinking to the future.

    You will continue to get hacked until you bite the bullet and pay for the plugins to be redeveloped and/or redo your site. Consider it a lesson.

    Thread Starter Cheg

    (@cheg)

    WPyogi, you can see our homepage when googling? I get a bunch of categories, but not the homepage. Our webmaster tools reports dropping from 7000 indexed pages to under 2000 and still dropping.

    I used https://ismyblogworking.com/www.gamingclimax.com also, and this alternates between saying not indexed by google and indexed with 401 results. Bing shows never indexed.

    Furthermore, I just found “<meta content=”noindex,nofollow” name=”robots”>” in the source code. I understand this is added when the privacy setting is selected to block search engines, but that is not selected. It seems this code is not being removed when the privacy settings are changed.

    Andrew – I believe you missed the gist of this topic. We were not hacked.

    The page you linked to shows:

    Your RSS feed is available.
    Your robots.txt file is valid and allows search engines to index your content.

    Yes it shows it’s not indexed, but I googled “gaming climax” and got
    1 your FB
    2 twitter
    3 your giveaways page
    4 your home page

    Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? That’s a good way to figure out if and/or why you’re having any google problems.

    Try: Logout of Google, clear browser cache – Google serves you content that is different when logged in…

    I see same as yogi.

    Thread Starter Cheg

    (@cheg)

    I just googled “gaming climax” too (we dont use a space, btw)

    I get Facebook, Giveaways, Twitter, and the 4th link is ClimaxGaming, not GamingClimax. This is not our site. So still nothing for our homepage at gamingclimax.com – it has been indexed as the first result for the past 2 years.

    Yes, we use Google webmaster tools. Fetching any page works great. Sitemaps submit just fine. If there is anything specifically that I could look at, that would be great, but I’ve looked through it dozens of times over the past weeks.

    View post on imgur.com

    Edit: I signed out and cleared cache, no change.

    Oops you’re right – not the same page. But if you had the site restored (going backwards), it seems like that could easily affect things…

    Thread Starter Cheg

    (@cheg)

    Okay, well having “<meta content=”noindex,nofollow” name=”robots”>” in our homepage source is blocking the homepage and it’s links from being indexed, correct?

    And that this code is usually applied when the privacy settings are chosen as “block search engines” and removed once “visible to everyone” is selected”

    I too am blaming the restore of our site, although it seems like a simple fix. A removal of the above code in theory sounds like the solution to the problems. The new problem is where to find that code? It’s not in the header or similar. Would the privacy.php do it?

    It looks like you have an SEO plugin?

    <!-- /platinum one seo pack -->

    What about that?

    Thread Starter Cheg

    (@cheg)

    The only options selected are:

    Automatically do 301 redirects for permalink changes:
    Canonical URLs:
    Rewrite Titles:

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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