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I have a long established (Started in Mambo>J1.0 >J1.5>J1.6>J2.5) site that suddenly in the last few weeks disappeared from Google page rank after sitting at #2 for the key word search, for years.
No errors in Google webmaster tools. Html verification is still in place although the site is now showing as unverified. Site map is fine with no crawl errors.
Page source has <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
Global configuration meta detail is set to "index,follow" as are the Meta details in the Front Page category, Article and Home menu.
What have I missed?
Where in J2.5.6 do you find $this->setMetaData ?

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A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society...than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. Paine 1776

Have you checked the default Template's index.php file to see if that is overriding Joomla settings ?

Have you uploaded the files from the Joomla full package ?

What were the last things you did to the site ?

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http://weblinksonline.co.uk/joomla-faq.html

1. Yes. I can find nothing at all in the template index.php which refers to the meta tags. Of course that does not mean that it is not there and I just don't recognise it.
2. Yes. full package used just to make sure. No change.
3. This must have happened in the past few weeks. No new extensions other than Marcos plugin. It does not seem to be the sort to change the meta details and upgrade of Kunena from 1.7.2 to 2. It seems also to coincide with the upgrade to J2.5.6.

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A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society...than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. Paine 1776

Compare the Template's index.php with the site output, look to see where the variable in the head tag corresponds to the html output.

Is this happening on all pages ?

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http://weblinksonline.co.uk/joomla-faq.html

Output is normal on all pages ( the same in terms of what is in the source at the start of the head) with the exception of template index.php which has:

as one would expect.

If you take a clean J2.5.6 install and put the template on it the default in Global Config is "index,follow" and
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" is not present in the source. Change Global Config to "noindex, follow" then <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" appears in source.
It must be getting called from within the site somewhere. If I could only find where the code was generated from......

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A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society...than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. Paine 1776

Doh
index.php
<meta name="rights" content="Content can only be used with permission of the site owner." />
what is next?

output
<meta name="rights" content="Content can only be used with permission of the site owner." />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
what is next?

Does it happen on all pages ?

Want to PM me ftp and SU login ? I can take a first hand look.

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http://weblinksonline.co.uk/joomla-faq.html

Not the Template ... tried with beez

Not the forum update .... updated the forum on my site don't have that problem

Noticed some of the icons in your Admin menus are missing ... possibly consider checking the database ? (perhaps something previously installed/uninstalled has altered something ?)

Extension manager >>> Update ... Purge then search for updates

I backed up the site ... installed 2.5.6 .... played with and saved different settings
No Avail

Your Home menu item is an Alias of your default Home menu item in main menu
Saved the default menu item as copy and that shows in page source
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />

Created a featured article menu item (Home 3) with same settings and that in page source was not showing a setting for robots meta.
(This is correct as index,follow is default and not normally stated)

Conclusion ... A database field for the default menu item got filled with the wrong data and editing the menu item does not change the data in the field
... Copying the default menu item allows the field to be filled with it's default data(in this case index/follow)
... Creating a new menu item does not place data in that field because it is not needed unless it is changed from default.

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http://weblinksonline.co.uk/joomla-faq.html

Found it!
Unpublishing the module Kunena Forum Latest v2.0.1 allows the source to display the correct robot "index, follow"

Off to post this in the Kunena forum. Many thanks to Webdongle who spent some time methodically testing various options and helped narrow this down.

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A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society...than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. Paine 1776

Can confirm that I have the same problem on my site with that module. So although a newly created menu item does not have the problem ... as soon as the module is assigned to that new item then the problem will show again.

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http://weblinksonline.co.uk/joomla-faq.html