Search Engines Blocked?

[dansbanners]

Hi,

I just noticed this new Site Visibility option in my Wordpress' site asking the following:

- I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers

- I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

Huh? What would be the purpose of blocking search engines? What are the pros and cons of each option, etc?

Thanks!

[sheila]

Search engines can spider your site and use up bandwidth and drive up server loads. So if you don't want to deal with that, you might want to block.

Also, if your content is private and you don't want to share it with the entire world via the Internet, then you'd want to block search engines.

But if you want the world to find your site, then you wouldn't want to block search engines. If you block them, then your site can't get listed on Google, etc... and when people search on those sites, they would not find your site in the search results list.