WordPress MU

I was becoming very frustrated with my new site because none of the blog posts were being indexed by the search engines. Also, I was not able to bookmark them with Digg or Stumbleupon...it would always throw an error.

Of course I did double-check the individual blog settings to make sure they were set to public and searchable...they were. Then today I found that the MAIN blog was set to invisible! I have since changed the main blog to visible...but is that the reason why my individual blog posts on the sub-blogs were not being indexed?

I mean...what happens when the main blog is set to invisible and the sub blogs are set to visible? What's actually going on behind the scenes?

Also, why did the search engines index the home page of each sub-blog, their tag pages, and the static "about" pages but not the actual posts themselves?

"Then today I found that the MAIN blog was set to invisible! I have since changed the main blog to visible...but is that the reason why my individual blog posts on the sub-blogs were not being indexed?"

Could've been ... were they sub-folder blogs? Because that woudl certainly do it.

".what happens when the main blog is set to invisible and the sub blogs are set to visible? What's actually going on behind the scenes?"

All that is done is a robots=nofollow is added to the header of that blog. Google & search engines read it and say "Oh, stop here! bye!" :D

"Also, why did the search engines index the home page of each sub-blog, their tag pages, and the static "about" pages but not the actual posts themselves? "

hard to say without a link we can see, to look at the html source. Because IME, google will slurp up WPMU blogs.

Well...after switching the main setting make the main blog visible to search engines I ran into the same problem. Neither Digg nor Stumble would allow me to submit the pages but gave me a 404 error saying the page did not exist (when of course, it did).

In frustration I ripped the entire site up by the roots after copying all the content to manually to text files. Database and Wordpress MU files were all scrubbed. I had previously tried to install the SuperCache plugin which failed. Found out later you need to have a dedicated server (which I don't) to run that as you need to be able to make fundamental changes to apache. I thought that maybe leftover "junk" was gumming things up in a way I didn't understand.

I re-installed and setup the site as before. When I went to try digg and stumbleupon, it did the same thing!

After some more research I was lead to believe that if you do not exit out of Cpanel before ripping out Wordpress, that Cpanel somehow will "raise the .htaccess file from the dead" and it will jam up a future install.

So I ripped everything out AGAIN! This time I made sure I was not logged into Cpanel when I deleted everything via FTP.

After ANOTHER reinstall, I didn't turn anything back on. No themes, plugins...nothing. I just setup a basic blog with the default theme, updated the General & Permalink settings and tried to digg a filler article I threw up.

STILL got the error.

In the end what fixed it was that I converted the permalink structure from /*postname*.php (my normal setup on all previous wordpress installs) to /*postname*/

Without the .php things seemed to work just fine. This never happened on regular wordpress...just this MU version. I dunno why it made a difference.