Blogging Tips

I read an article from Mihaela Lica today on SitePoint entitled ‘Bad Nested Code Could Hurt Your SE Rankings‘. In the article she talks about how badly or improperly nested code can hurt your search engines and notes that plugins are one of the biggest causes of this.

One of the examples she uses is the use of the popular What Would Seth Godin Do WordPress plugin.

She notes:

If you set the plugin to add this welcome message before the first paragraph of a blog entry, its text might be the only thing Google indexes as the “description” of the page it appears on. The plugin deactivates the welcome text after a certain number of returning visits, but Google’s crawler will be seen by the plugin every time as a new visitor, so you will end up with a series of articles indexed by Google like this:

The image she was referred to is below (take from original article):

Plugins can hurt your Search Engine rankings

I’m a huge fan of plugins. They let you customise your blog in pretty much any way you want and they add more functionality in the back end and on the main site itself. Though it is incredibly easy to forget that the plugin adds a lot of code to your page.

Frequently this code is written badly, other times it is placed on your page in an area which will affect your search engine rankings. It’s important to remember this when adding a plugin to your blog as there’s no point making your blog design validate perfectly if you are going to add dozens of plugins to your blog.

In my opinion, it just isn’t practical to check the code if every plugin you use, even though it’s something we probably should do. However, it may be worth checking your blogs listing in the search engines a week or so after adding any new plugins to your blog just incase your listing is affected in any way.

You can read Mihaela Licas article at the link below

Related Link : Bad Nested Code Could Hurt Your SE Rankings