As a result of last nights post, I dove in and added a check to my Robots Meta plugin that checks whether you're allowing search engines to spider your site.

If not, it'll throw an ugly warning on each and every page until you fix it:

The code for it is easy, and as I'd like other plugins to start using it as well, let me give it to you here:

function blog_public_warning() {
  if ( '0' == get_option('blog_public') ) {
    echo "<div id='message' class='error'><p>";
    echo "<strong>Robots Meta Issue: You're blocking access to robots.</strong>";
    echo " You must <a href='options-privacy.php'>go to your Privacy settings</a>";
    echo " and set your blog visible to everyone.";
    echo "</p></div>";
  }
}
add_action('admin_footer', 'blog_public_warning');

That's easy enough, I think each and every WordPress plugin to do with SEO should do this check, to be honest.

Checking Blog Privacy Settings is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!