What did your research reveal? How did you fix it? How was the plugin indicated as the cause? I’m curious.
I’m curious too because I’m developing my first site wordpress site and using this plugin.
After installing the plugin, it updated Virtual robots.txt
This blocked google from indexing my site. Also, the sitemap that it was referring to was wrong and had to fix this as well.
I expect that if I install any plugin, I should get all the default setting correct until the time I customize it for better use. I can’t even test this plugin in localhost, so a big risk that went wrong.
To my best knowledge, our plugin doesn’t alter the robots.txt file? Could you tell us step by step what happened and what you feel the plugin changed?
To be honest, one look at your site tells me you have all you need for a Google penalty.. [Link redacted] is flooded with banners and ads. I think the update happened to be around the time Google started to dislike your website…
ahh, finally I get a reply from developer after a month.
The day after I install plugin, google stop indexing my site. I had to create robot.txt and then google was able to index the site, but I lost the ranking.
After multiple changes, the day I deleted Yoast entries from database my site started crawling back to original google ranking on those keywords.
I am surprised by your observation that my site is right for google penalty. Its perfectly under google guidelines of not having more than 3 google ads on a page. If that’s violation, I guess most of the websites will be blocked.
So, and correct me if I am wrong, you created a robots.txt and lost rankings?
Our plugin doesn’t tell you to create one, it helps you manage one. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, that isn’t something the plugin requires at all to work.
Regarding the penalty waiting to happen: Panda isn’t just about banners, it’s about quality websites. With all the moving parts that look like banners as well, and the 90’s design, my personal opinion is that Google might consider it low quality – regardless of what I think about the website myself, let that be clear.
But back to your question: I really don’t think WordPress SEO did this, and you tell me as well robots.txt did this.
in my [Link redacted] the yoast plugin had been crushing the forum part and i hat to replace it. But i have it on other niches. Good plugin actually
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
Guys, please stop embedding links into your reviews.
Sorry Andrew. It’s just nice to know what website we are talking about. But I get your point.
And thanks, suntravel12. A forum tip is always to add it to a subdomain, so the user generated content on the forum doesn’t interfere with your own content’s SEO.
Well, the day after uninstalling and deleting all entries of your plugin I am back to what I was on those keywords. So that was definitely related to plugin.
Also, rather than criticizing quality and content of website it would have been better to understand what plugin did wrong to loose its ranking. This would have helped you to create better plugin.
Hello, I was relieved to hear I wasn’t the only one having this problem! I had similar situation with my client – a well know Canadian firm with #1 rankings in google, guy we hired installed Yoast and other things we didn’t ask him to and everything went to crap. Would you be able to share the methods you used for getting things back to normal (any database troubles getting rid of plugin?), and any more simplistic plugins you can think of for doing simple on-page meta title/keyword/description and more customizable XML sitemap. How immediate was your recovery? Thanks a lot, in my situation jobs and reputations at stake.
djfezzik at g mail
