Are Your WordPress Plugins Hurting Your Rankings?
Over the weekend we received an alert from Google that no webmaster wants to see: Google’s bots found hundreds of 404 errors that had sprung up overnight!
Luckily our Google Webmaster Tools account alerted us to the issue, which was caused by a faulty plugin, allowing us to act quickly on a fix before too much damage had been done. While we were able to prevent most of our keyphrases from slipping, strangely enough our most competitive keyphrase took a dive to the bottom of the first page.
The keyphrase is now well and truly on the mend, but the issue brought to light an important trap many webmasters find themselves in. At it’s core SEO is about delivering a well built website with great content. If you’re ignoring issues in the first half of that equation in favor of off-page SEO tactics then you’re going to struggle building and maintaining a first page ranking.
But simply building a great website isn’t enough to maintain your rankings. Websites are so prone to random issues and break downs that it takes a constant monitoring of your websites issues to ensure that all your hard work isn’t thrown down the drain with one ailment that went undiagnosed.
So how can you stay on top of what’s going on with your site?
A good first step is to set up your Google Webmaster Tools account to check for errors Google’s bot finds with your site. Your WMT account will send alerts to the email you set it up with alerting you to any issues it finds, allowing you to react to problems before they spiral out of control and torpedo your raankings. Treating crawl issues as a top priority and scheduling fixes as soon as possible will hopefully allow you to minimise any harm to your rankings.
Ignoring these types of on-page issues in favor of easier off-page SEO techniques is like asking a bodybuilder what protein shake he uses to pack on muscle before asking about his diet or exercise regime. Look at the big picture and build the right foundation for your rankings before charging ahead with the smaller SEO techniques that make up the last few percent.
Have you ever seen your website’s rankings drop overnight? Share with us how you fixed it!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
