WordPress site owners have an option under Settings > Privacy to keep their site open to visitors, but block search engines. Very handy when developing a site, or managing a private site that you don’t want the world to see, but you don’t want to have to deal with logins either.
We often use that setting on sites under development…and more than once forgot to open the site to search engines once the site was launched. Ouch.
Around WordPress 3.1, a handy feature was added where a line of text was added in the admin next to the name of the site saying “Search Engines Blocked” when search engines were, you guessed it, blocked. Like this:
For some reason, in WordPress 3.2 that notification line has disappeared. Here’s that same site, search engines still blocked, but upgraded to 3.2:
That notification was a life saver. Does anyone know where it went? And why it was taken away? I miss it and want it back. Sniff.
