I imagine everyone is familiar with the ‘Privacy’ setting in WordPress (version 3.0). Located under the settings menu of the WordPress administration area, the setting sits often untouched; in part because there aren’t many options accompanied with it and becuase many do not understand exactly what it is doing.

So what are those privacy settings for and what do they actually do?

The simple answer is that these settings effect the META information your web site (if your site doesn’t have a robots.txt). By selecting “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” you’re telling WordPress to put “< meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ / >” in the head of your site. Most engines will respect this (but technically do not have to). Anytime something views your web site it identifies itself to the web site (user-agent); engines will generally identify themselves as a search-bot and look for the robots section of the meta information of the web site. This will also tell WordPress to stop notifying any ping services that you have setup. WordPress should also hide the ping services option from you when this option is selected.

By selecting “I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including … “ you’re, as you would expect, doing the opposite of what “I would like to block …” is doing. Your not restricting search engines with the META tag robots and your allowing your ping services to be notified. This will also allow the ping services option to reappear so that you can use it once again.