3 Types Of WordPress Plugins That Can Harm Your Search Engine Rankings
WordPress plugins can be the best thing you ever add to a blog, or they can completely destroy your blog or website. Here we are some of the common mistakes that are made in configuring plugins:
Plugins That Control robots.txt
This is a feature of many plugins including SEO Ultimate, Keyword Statistics, Meta Robots and other plugins that proffer edit your robots.txt . This not to knock these fantastic plugins, which are great. It does tell you to be cautious with these, and to make sure you do not have indexing disabled or caching disabled.
SIDE NOTE: caching search results is a matter of some debate. one side of the argument says that by not allowing indexing they make Google crawl their site more often. The other side days it reduces usability since your site may not always be up, or may change. Î definitely tend to agree with the latter.
WordPress Plugins Which Automatically Create Links
This would include any plugin that causes text already in your site to link to other pages inside or outside of your site. Some examples include SEO smart links, YARPP, recent posts and broken link checker. each of these plugins is highly recommended, and can be useful to your blog when configured properly.
The best way to use auto linking plugins is in places where the addition of links would not be damaging. A good example would be on blog posts. These informational articles are meant to bring traffic to your site, traffic you hope stays there. In these instances, it is useful and wise to provide plenty of additional content for your visitors to peruse and Chandler website designer best practices tells us there is value in promoting continued engagement on your site.
A bad place where these plugins can cause problems would be landing or conversion pages. These pages are the money pages that convert your visitor to a customer. Your visitor typically got to this page by deciding to Google or click on a link with your main product listed. This person is ready to become a customer, they do not any longer need or want to be sold. To provide links away from this page without good reason is an SEO and sales mistake. It is a very common SEO error that arises from these plugins, though most if properly configured can avoid this.
Caching Plugins
Caching is a great technique for speeding up websites, and WordPress is lucky enough to have terrifically easy caching plugins freely available. These plugins can also have a very bad effect if not properly configured.
A great example of the fallacies of caching lies in making changes to your site. Many plugins are set to auto renew the cache, but some must be manually set up to renew. If this is not set up, changes will not be reflected. Changes such as fixed links, changed text, added pictures can all be invisible until that cache is cleared out and a new set of static files generated.
This has actually happened to me in the past, where inexplicable old content was found in places. With properly configured caching on your WordPress website, you can take advantage of the additional speed without any of these problems. This is fairly basic for anyone using caching plugins, but here is a tip for my fellow WP Super Cache users: when uploading modifications to supporting files, such as headers, footers, css, javascript, etc… browse to the content tab, and click on the delete cache button to get WordPress displaying your changes. Any Chandler SEO Company will benefit from caching, but you must understand how it works and how it is implemented so you know when it needs to be cleared and what is caching.
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