Your blog is live. Your site looks great. But it’s still not showing up in search results. What’s going wrong? The problem might not be what’s on your pages. It could be a setting you’ve never touched. Hidden technical settings in your website’s backend can quietly block search engines from crawling or indexing your site.
Let’s take a closer look at the three settings that often get overlooked and how you can fix them.
1. Make sure your site is allowed to show up in search results
It sounds obvious, but many websites have search engine visibility turned off without knowing it. This often happens when a site is under construction or just launched.
In WordPress, there’s a setting that tells search engines not to index your site. If this is checked, your site won’t appear in Google no matter what else you’ve done.
What to do
Go to Settings > Reading in your WordPress dashboard. Make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not selected. This setting overrides everything else.
2. Audit your crawl and indexing rules
Even if your site is visible to search engines, certain rules might be blocking them from accessing important content. This often happens through:
- robots.txt file: tells search engines which parts of your site they can and can’t crawl.
- noindex tag: prevents specific pages from appearing in search results.
These settings are useful, for example to block admin pages or thank-you pages, but used incorrectly, they can hide key pages you actually want to rank.
What to do
Check your site using Google Search Console to see which pages are being crawled and indexed. Or use Progress Planner. With Ravi’s Recommendations, you’ll quickly find crawl and index issues that need your attention.
For a broader SEO checklist, read our post on SEO best practices for site maintenance.
3. Remove unnecessary archive pages
By default, WordPress creates archive pages for authors, dates, and post formats. These often show repeated content and clutter your site’s structure.
That can cause problems. Search engines may struggle to understand which version of the content is most important. This weakens your site’s authority and can lower your visibility.
What to do
If you’re not using author or format archives, disable them. It keeps your site structure clean and avoids duplicate content issues.
Looking to improve your homepage instead? Read Make a great first impression with your home page for quick wins.
Want to find the hidden SEO mistakes on your site?
Even small misconfigurations can hurt your rankings. Progress Planner helps you find and fix SEO blockers fast.
With Ravi’s Recommendations, you’ll get a personalized checklist to make sure your content is indexable, crawlable, and ready to rank.
Check your site today and make sure it’s working with you, not against you.
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