Sometimes, after moving a site from a development environment into a live production environment, users and developers can forget to uncheck the “Discourage Search Engines From Indexing Your Site” box located within the Reading Settings. It’s a terrible feeling to realize months after a site has gone live, that search engines failed to index the site because you forgot to change a setting. This is easily preventable using the Check Search Engine Visibility on Migration plugin.
Developed by Rhys Wynne, this fairly new plugin prevents users from forgetting to turn on search engines after migrating their site or changing the blog URL. When the warning is displayed, it won’t go away until you visit the Check/Set domain visibility settings page. There are other plugins that have similar functionality but this plugin forces the user to check the search engine visibility settings with no alternative way to dismiss the warning box.
As long as you don’t forget to activate this plugin on the live site, it will remind you to double-check the search engine settings when it detects the URL has changed.
Have you ever transferred a website from a development server to a production environment and forgot to enable search engines? If so, how long did it take before you discovered the error?
D’oh! I’ve done this more than I care to admit. I hate how something that’s such a simple oversight can have such a devastating impact on a website’s success. I will definitely be kicking the tires on this new plugin, and if it works for me I’ll be including it on all future builds.