Be Careful Handling Google Indexing and Searched Listing Correctly

2016-03-21


Google's Indexing and Searching are 2 important concepts in SEO. When we learn SEO, we might gather different information from different resources, some resource might be no more available, expired or no more work correctly;

Recently, we got knowledge which was about "Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way", which is from famous WordPress SEO plugins maker Yoast. What we wanted was preventing Google searching engine "DO NOT store our website information but still list our website in searching result".

So 2 concepts were called: Indexing and Listing.

We were taught Indexing was the process of downloading a site a page content to Google servers; Listing was Showing a site in the searching result.

Also, we were taught if listing a website by Google searching, the indexing was not necessary.

All content was actually no problem in original article. However, we did not understand the content completely but just saw there was a "summary result" which put the following single line to our .htaccess file:

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"

But actually this line of code was for "entire site can be indexed, but will never be shown the search result."

We do not know why the original article titled as " Preventing your site from being indexed " but at the conclusion-like section gave visitor a wired opposite "solution". So we misunderstood and  put the line of code into our website, caused the Google engine could not list our website in any searching result pages. That means: our website was disappear by searching. All the visitors could ONLY input our website domain name to visit our website.

So if you want your website can be searched by visitors using Google, DO NOT use this line of code in your .htaccess file: Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow".