Hello! I noticed that after I activated the Google Site Kit plugin on my WordPress site yesterday, my organic traffic dropped by 95% or more. It feels like some kind of persecution or censorship from those who are supposed to help us gain more visibility! It’s a total joke to install this plugin and then constantly appear last in Google search results. I honestly feel like this company is evil. They use their knowledge for harm. Why would they do this to us?
Can someone explain how to fix this? Can you help?
The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]
Hi there @aryribeiro, thanks for opening a support topic with us. I’d be more than happy to help you with this and look into what your traffic may have dropped since installing and activating Site Kit. To begin, please could you share the following:
Are you using the consent mode setting within Site Kit? The reason I ask is because I don’t currently see any consent being granted when visiting your site and checking via the Google Tag Assistant tool. This could explain why you have had a sudden drop in traffic.
As mentioned above, this could be due to the consent for visitors in the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland and the United Kingdom not being captured correctly.
With regards to appearing last in Google search results, I don’t see this. When searching myself I see your site at the top of the list so there doesn’t appear to be an issue here. If you continue to face issues with your sites search results then I’d recommend reaching out to the experts at the Search Console Help Center.
Let me know if you have any questions on the above.
Adam! I think you might’ve nailed it… I didn’t enable Consent Mode — mainly because I didn’t know what it was and assumed it would be harmful.
I’ll go ahead and activate it now and run some new tests. I’ll keep you posted here. Thanks in advance!
Also, I’d like to apologize and share this: I get emails almost daily from Google Search Console, with “warnings” saying my site has this or that issue. I can’t take it anymore — so many emails telling me I’m doing everything wrong. They create the problems and then expect us to fix them. The level of pressure feels insane.
@aryribeiro Glad to hear that I may have highlighted the issue here. Please do activate consent mode following our guide and let me know if you have any issues or questions. I will await your response on this.
With regards to the Search Console emails, we aren’t in control of these and they’re not related to Site Kit but I understand your concern when receiving and reading them. As mentioned above, the experts at the Search Console Help Center should be able to give more advice on these if you are concerned about them and the content within them.
I look forward to receiving an update after you have activated and configured consent mode.
I just checked again, and the censorship is still happening. I enabled Consent Mode and the related API for WordPress, but so far — nothing.
Before I noticed the issue, the site was disconnected. The Google Site Kit plugin had been disconnected because of a migration from Hostinger to AWS. But as soon as I reconnected everything — boom, I got censored.
@aryribeiro Thanks for the update and sorry to hear you’re still facing issues. When checking your site in the Google Tag Assistant I still don’t see the necessary permissions being granted after I give consent on your site.
This is because the configuration for consent mode is still not configured correctly which is why you may still be seeing a drop off in your traffic as nobody can give consent for this data to be captured. I’d suggest reading back through our consent mode guide paying specific attention to the consent management plugin section which lists our suggested CMPs you can install and configured to work with Site Kit and consent mode.
If you do make these changes I would be glad to check your site once more to see if the consent is being updated once you have made the changes to the configuration.
Thanks again for your support. I removed an old consent management plugin and installed a new one, as suggested in the link you shared. I’ve configured everything and will monitor the results until tomorrow. I’ll report back here afterwards. Cheers!
@aryribeiro I have just checked once more from the tag assistant and can confirm that I now do see my consent for your site being granted so this looks good to me and what I’d expect to see.
Please do monitor the results over the next 24 hours and let me know how you get on but hopefully you should start to see the traffic coming in when users are consenting on your site.
I removed the old consent management plugin and installed a new one: Complianz Premium. I followed its entire setup process step by step. It recognized the Google Site Kit API and everything. Honestly, I’m out of ideas at this point — the issue is still happening.
Bitnami AMIs on AWS LightSail often block plugin access to certain WordPress files, and that’s already driving me crazy over here.
@aryribeiro Having checked your site once more I can confirm that you have consent mode setup correctly and consent is being captured as it should. I have also checked your site source code and can’t see that Site Kit is placing your Analytics code. Have you selected for Site Kit to place your Analytics code? If so, then this could be getting altered or blocked by a conflicting plugin.
I’d be happy to check your site setup once more if you could share your Site Health information once more. You can use this form to share privately if preferred. You can also try troubleshooting this yourself by temporarily deactivating other plugins to see if you notice a difference. I can also check your source code for you again when doing this if you let me know once done.
Take a look at the screenshot I’m sending now. Yet another pointless warning. If this isn’t censorship, I honestly don’t know what is. I’m not doing ANYTHING, and I still get emails like this almost every day — even videos with honest doctors speaking the truth are being censored.
I disconnected three services from the Google Site Kit plugin. I left only Google Search Console, since that’s the one I care about the most. If this plugin turns out to be useless, I’ll just remove it and hope for the best. For now, I’m monitoring to see if things go back to “normal.”
This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by aryribeiro.
@aryribeiro I won’t be able to check this for you if you disconnect your Analytics as I need to see the Analytics code placed by Site Kit to see if it is being altered or blocked.
I’m unsure what emails you are referring to above and don’t believe these are related to Site Kit as so I am limited on the support I can offer with those.
I am happy to help you with Site Kit but it needs to be active with the desired modules active for me to check. It’s likely as I say above that a third party plugin you have may be blocking or altering Site Kit placed code. We have seen this in the past particularly with caching and optimization plugins which as WP Rocket which you have active on your site. The cause in these instances is usually when users have the JS minification settings switched on.
Let me know if you have any questions about the above.
Adam! Now that you mentioned it, I just remembered — I installed WP Rocket here… and I was already suspicious about it! My traffic was normal before I installed it and connected Site Kit. Looks like I’ll have to remove it and install a better caching plugin. Could you please recommend another one?
I removed the Site Kit plugin for testing purposes, but Google’s analysis is still active, since I’ve always had my own tracking code directly integrated into my homepage.
Now, something funny: I didn’t configure anything in WP Rocket. I’m using the default settings that automatically apply as soon as you install the plugin. I see a lot of complaints about WP Rocket — people talking badly about it, etc. But honestly, the site became much faster right after installing it.
Is it possible to configure WP Rocket in a way that doesn’t hurt my site?
@aryribeiro It’s not clear what may be causing issues with code placement on your site, it’s possible as I stated above that the WP Rocket minification setting could be contributing to this. If this is the cause then there is an exclusion you can add for Site Kit so that any Site Kit code is ignored when using this setting.
To add the exclusion for Site Kit, go to Settings > WP Rocket > File Optimization > JavaScript Files > Minify JavaScript Files > Exclude JavaScript Files and add the following:
This should then exclude Site Kit from this option and stop and code placement from being blocked or altered.
With regards to recommending another plugin, I’m unfortunately unable to do that as that is ultimately your choice for your website. While I can share the exclusion code above for WP Rocket, I can’t share any other recommendations for it but I am sure the support team at WP Rocket can help you further with that.
Let me know how you get on with the above and if you have any further Site Kit questions.
As we didn’t receive a response I’ll mark this as resolved. Feel free to open a new support topic if you continue to encounter issues, or reopen this topic and we’d be happy to assist.
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