For about 5 months I've had a huge issue with Google not caching my site and today I've cracked it. If you use Wordpress (an easy and powerful way to start blogging) just like me then you’ve probably messed around with every plug-in you can find. However it never occurred to me that a plug-in could have caused so much hassle. If you’ve used a plug-in called WP-PostRatings then make sure you have the newest version because if you don’t Search Bots Unable to Index Site bots won’t be able to find your index.

Since I upgraded the plug-in I’ve had over 40 bots in and out of my site in the last hour so hopefully in the next week or so my site will be cached and I can get my PR rank back along with a couple of extra readers.

Oliver I'm glad you finally got this sorted out. Sorry I wasn't able to help more. I never would have guessed a WP plugin was the cause, though I did have my own issues with the way Google spidered my WordPress blog over the summer.

Since this could affect you and I guess anyone else using WordPress I'll share a little. Google was for some reason indexed the feeds instead of the posts and the feeds were going into the supplemental index, which meant I lost most of my traffic from the big G. I searched around and found a couple of posts at WMW describing the issue.

I later blogged about WP Posts Going Supplemental In Google. Since I fixed things with some simple additions to my robots.txt file traffic traffic from Google has been increasing daily. It's almost like the floodgates are finally open.

Definitely something to check out if you have a WordPress blog. I'm not sure if the same would be true of other blogging engines.

Thanks, I've had a read and made some changes I will let you know how it goes and I think others will find this thread usefull in the future as well.

It took me awhile to figure out it was the feeds causing the problem and within a day of making the simple changes I'm getting a lot of long tail search traffic to the post that seemed like they had been blocked for months. It could have been something else that just clicked in, but I'm very close to 100% sure that fixing the feed problem is the cause for the increase in traffic.

Of course the traffic is from posts that had been previously ranking so it's not like this is something to improve ranking. It was more fixing a loss. I did also make a couple of other changes around the same time, which may have had some impact, but I think the feed issue was the main thing.

Cached today, took less than a week

Congrats. I'm sure you're feeling a sense of relief.