Settings Reading Screen

The options in the Settings >> Reading Screen are few in number, but still important. You can decide if you want posts, or a “static” Page, displayed as your blog’s front (main) page. You can also adjust how many posts are displayed on that main page. In addition, you can adjust syndication feed features to determine how the information from your site is sent to a reader’s web browser or other applications.

Learn more about Administration Screens on the WordPress Codex.

Front page displays

Use this setting to determine if your posts or a “static” Page displays as your blog’s front (main) page. This setting displays only if you have one or more Pages defined. Please note static front page plugins and other ‘posts display’ control/restriction plugins may affect how these features work!

• Your latest posts – Check to radio button so your latest posts are displayed on the blog’s front page. Remember, the number of posts you display is controlled by the “Blog pages show at most” setting.
• A static page (select below) – Check this radio button to cause a “static” Page to be displayed as your blog’s front page. At the same time, choose the Page that will display your actual Posts. The Front page and Posts page cannot be the same value.

Blog pages show at most

[X] posts – Enter the number of posts to be displayed, per page, on your site.

Syndication feeds show the most recent

[X] posts – Enter the number of posts people will see when they download one of your site’s feeds.

For each article in a feed, show:

Determines whether or not the feed will include the full article or just a summary.

• Full text – Click this radio button to include the full content of each post
• Summary – Click this radio button include a summary of the post. This could save bandwidth.

Search Engine Visibility

[ct_alert type=”info” title=”Note”] The Settings >> Privacy screen has been removed from WordPress as of Version 3.5.0. [/ct_alert]

Check the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box to ask search engines not to index this site. When the option is checked, the following happens:

• Causes “<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />” to be generated into the section (if wp_head is used) of your site’s source, causing search engine spiders to ignore your site.
• Causes hits to robots.txt to send back: User-agent: * Disallow: /
• Stops pings to ping-o-matic and any other RPC ping services
• Allows normal visitors.

Note: This does NOT actually block access to your site.  It is up to search engines to honor your request to not be indexed.

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