Do you use either the WP Greet Box or WWSGD (What Would Seth Godin Do?) plugins on your WordPress blogs?
Have you placed them to show at the top of your posts and/or pages?
If so, you might be losing some valuable free traffic from the search engines.
Take a look at the screenshot above to the right. The “if you are new here” text shown in bold shows up in the Google search results description when bloggers allow the code from those two plugins to render at the top of their posts.
By result they lose the space alotted for a proper description — which when written correctly can generate LOTS of extra traffic.
This problem can be solved in one of 2 ways:
- Have the plugin set to render at the bottom of the post.
- A better alternative is to enter a proper meta description either through your Custom Fields or by using a plugin like the Platinum SEO Pack.
Your choice.
Do one or the other, but please don’t waste valuable free search engine traffic — it hurts my head when I see you doing that!
BTW, if you liked this post, you might also be interested in reading “WordPress Plugins and How I Use Them“.
About Rosalind Gardner
I use WP Greet Box. Thank you so much for the heads up. I am going to go and change the settings right now and will look at the other option and maybe even get rid of it. Thanks again.
Hi Gerri,
You probably don’t need to change over to another option.. Just put it at the bottom of your posts.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Ros
Thanks Ros, I use all in one seo to solve that problem.
Cheers
Ian
Well spotted Rosalind. Other types of plugin that also tend to mess up the SERPs display unless you’re careful are those that concatenate the CSS and javascript into single files to reduce load times.
Also look out for the effects of in-post text spinners – they look fine on the page but a couple I’ve tried really mess up the RSS feed.
Hi Chris,
“In-post text spinners”? Can you elaborate? I’m not a fan of article spinners… are these different?
Cheers,
Ros
Thanks for another great tip Ros. I am very new to all this SEO stuff and all your help and tips are a real help for a newbie like myself.
Thanks
Happy to hear that the article helped, Lyn.
Thanks Rosalind. I didn’t realize that some plugins can affect Google listings.
You’re welcome, Jeezy.
Great information. Thanks for sharing this. That’s one of those things a lot of bloggers probably would not catch for quite a while.
Thanks for this info, Ros.
I have the WWSGD plugin on my blog but fortunately its at the bottom of the post. So I guess, its not much of a problem.
But this is certainly a point to be kept in mind for any future changes.
Uhhh that just disappointed me, but thanks so much from bringing it up, I just noticed it is showing up, when to fix it and now it’s on the bottom. Thanks!
““In-post text spinners”? Can you elaborate? I’m not a fan of article spinners… are these different?”
In-post text spinners are things like WP Rewriter, WP Spinner etc. They allow you to place Jet-syntax spun text directly into your posts to avoid potential duplicate content problems with parasites stealing your copy and reposting it. They work fine on the page but pass the coded text directly into the RSS feed, which is obviously a big no-no.
Thanks Chris!
Sounds like there should be an easier solution, eh?
Cheers,
Ros
Thank you Rosalind. I have the WWSGD plugin and was wondering where my visits were? I guess the thank me later plugin serves the same purpose and thanks people for contributing to the blog eh?
Isn’t there another fix? Couldn’t you simply deactivate the “noscript” option in WP Greet Box setting? I was of the impression that googlebots (or any other bot for that matter) don’t use JavaScript. So, if you have the “noscript” option activated, this will allow the bot to index the text. However, if you deactivate that one option, presto the problem is fixed.
Some three days ago I don’t know what happened to my site. It messed up totally. The posts are indexed but when making Google search, What shows up is another post with the TITLE/keyword in the Google search result preview. I don’t know if I explain it well, anyway if you click on the search result you see in Google then it gets you to another post. I am frustrated within two days because I am missing some traffic.
I remember I installed popup plugin. I don’t know if that is what messed up my page. BUt I did not install the ones mentioned here. Don’t know what to do.