Monitor Your WordPress Plugins

File this under common sense advice, but it’s something to keep in mind when using WordPress plugins. You should always be aware of how they work, what they do, and their current settings on your WordPress based website.

I have the Simply Exclude plugin used on a few of my websites. In fact, I essentially copied the meat of one of my sites to use as the base for my other sites. Unfortunately, I never checked the Simply Exclude plugin settings, and I had blocked a specific type of page on my site. Upon replicating that particular page over and over, I was creating pages that blocked search engines from seeing them. They aren’t critical pages or advertisers’ pages, but they are important.  Bozo move on my part.

The good news is that I caught this error and can advise you on not doing the same thing. The other good news is that upon allowing search engines to see those pages, I should see quite a jump in traffic. The bad news is that I was blocking certain pages for a long time, which probably cost me traffic and revenue.

Do yourself a favor when you develop. Learn about the features and functionality of all your plugins. Avoid silly mistakes like the one I made.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

4 COMMENTS

  1. Yup, I had similar situation as well.

    I had SEO plugin (not important the exact one) installed on one of my recently established blogs and after 2 months checked my site via Google webmaster tools and found that each and every pages has duplicated meta description, 340 in total.

    Checked the source and really found that each page has 2 descriptions, one I placed via plugin and one default generated my WordPress template. So before you install themes or plugins, check if functions are not duplicated

    I found it 2 days ago, so don’t know what will happens after I have removed all 340 duplicates

  2. That happens a lot, probably too often. There are a lot of various settings and all sorts of “gotchas” when it comes to SEO-related stuff.

    That’s where an SEO Audit can really come in handy, an overview of your site for all the issues possibly that could lead to a drop in search engine rankings.

    There are several tools out there that will allow you to spider your own website just like the search engines do, and grab valuable data. You might want to take a look at some of them (or maybe just even one) to make sure that your site doesn’t have SEO issues.

  3. yes its a quite confusion type stuff.
    this is what problem i was facing.but i came across such review while surfing Google.
    well thanks for sharing this 🙂

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