Sorry, yes, it should crawl the links - they used to do that.

But you can prove it to yourself, by doing what I said - and then report back.

Yes and you can test it by creating a page that is linked from nowhere else and then check your logs or analytics

It could be that the older wordpress had a setting that this new version has decided to ignore. This is typical of programmers!

The next possibility is to look in the database, but the options part of the database is hard to read.

Another idea is to look in the code of the the theme and hack it, so it is permanently index, follow or just remove that altogether.

Maybe someone else has a better idea?

Alan

Yes, I would have them indexed in that case too.

I think it is the categories that are noindex.

I think this is an 'All in one SEO pack' adjustable feature.

In the  setup for that, look for a checkbox:

"use noindex for categories"

uncheck that if it is checked.

If that isn't it, I don't know the answer

Thank you Mark

Nice looking site!

Your front page is index, follow.

Index pages are noindex, follow

Final pages are index, follow

I do something very close to this on my site.

Often, index pages are useless to searchers, because the index page changes so quickly that by the time the info gets into a search result, the information is no longer on that page, and the searcher will either just click away, cursing you and your site, or they will go looking through a few index pages and then curse you when they can't find what they wanted.

So I agree with the way you're doing that - if it is the case that the content changes quickly. If the index pages are just collectors of groups of items, then index, follow would be better, provided that you have enough text on the page to make it worthwhile.

As to how to make that happen, it isn't obvious.

I need to upgrade some of my sites to 3.5.

It could be that you have a plugin or a "custom field" that sets the index follow.

I suggest you edit a post and a page and scroll down to see if you have a field that handles it, such as "robotsmeta" that is set to "noindex,follow" for those pages

Hello Mark.

Please send me a bitly shortened link to your website so I can see what you are seeing

It probably isn't your robots file.

First try this.

In the Admin section, you should see "Settings" on the left navigation

Click that and you should see "Privacy"

Click that and you should see two radio buttons

<label for="blog-public">I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers</label>

<label for="blog-norobots">I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors</label>

Obviously, choose the top one and save it.

Then, refresh your front page or inner pages and look in the code to see if it still says noindex

If you have a cache, you will need to flush it.

Your sitemap should only list pages that actually exist.

If you delete some pages, then you need to rebuild the sitemap.

Ditto if you delete them and redirect.

Google is always lagging, so if you delete 10 pages and then update the sitemap, even if google downloads the sitemap immediately, they will still be running crawls on the old map, and they may be crawling the now-missing pages, but haven't shown the failures in your WMT yet.

If you update your sitemap quickly, it is possible they will never crawl the missing pages and get a 404 or 301.

(but of course, there could be other sites pointing to the now-missing pages, and the 404s will show up elsewhere as missing)

I am always checking, adding, deleting and redirecting pages, and I update the current sitemap every hour and all the others are rebuilt at midnight every night. I usually do deletions just before midnight if I can, to minimize the time the sitemap is out of sync.

Are there any site quality expert around?

Someone with actual experience and not guesses?

This is important to me, I may only have a few days to get this right.

I switched back to the original account, so ads are showing now, but I need to fix and switch back.

The big problem is there is no way to tell what the google testers saw, that they didn't like, or what they thought they saw.

Google policy doesn't include external ads in the count of 3.

I have removed the leaderboard, in case that was the problem, but if that was the problem, why didn't they say anything about that leaderboard over the past 5 years, since the google adsense team advised using it?

Where did you see screaming bananas?