Here’s something every SEO blogger must do when setting up a new WordPress blog: check privacy settings.

This option can be found under Settings > Privacy on the left sidebar.

The default setting is private (ask search engines not to index this site). Ideally, you’d want to finish furnishing your new blog with widgets and plugins, and maybe a few content before showing it off to the search engine spiders (robots that check a website’s content every now and then, for indexing).

If you feel that you have ‘opened up’ your site too soon, don’t worry. Search engine spiders will eventually index a later version of your blog. But what we’ve found is that the first indexing can determine your ranking for your site, so don’t give search engines an initial impression that your blog is a “thin” site, beef it up with some content first, before giving the SE’s the green light to come and check it out.

To see which pages have been indexed so far, do a site: example.com search (replace example.com or www.example.com with your own domain).

site:domain.com search shows which pages have been indexed

There’s a disclaimer note in WordPress about these settings though:

Note: Neither of these options blocks access to your site — it is up to the search engines to honor your request.

Just think of these privacy settings as your website’s stoplight. There’s a red light for ‘stop’ and a green light for ‘go’. But sometimes, there are drivers who ignore traffic lights.

Anyway, make sure you allow search engines to crawl your site, for SEO’s sake.