ObbieZ

I had a client freak out a few days ago with the “your site can’t be indexed” message. Here’s what happened:

Yoast brought in this OnPage thing, which “tests” the crawlability of a site by sending in a fake googlebot. The Wordfence plugin blocks fake googlebots. So when OnPage’s fake googlebot gets blocked by Wordfence, it complains about being unable to index the site.

Checking Google and searching for “link:http://sitename.whatever”, the results looked as they should. So Google WAS indexing the site.

Disabling Wordfence got rid of the ugly message, but it wasn’t necessary… only the FAKE googlebot from OnPage was getting blocked, not the REAL googlebot.

This is a lesson in how plugins can behave undesirably when interacting with each other. The Yoast developers should have known that Wordfence is a highly used plugin and included it in a test environment.

If Yoast wishes to force this OnPage thing onto us, they need to communicate with the Wordfence developers to find a way to allow the test crawls to happen.

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