Rogue WP Plugin or Revenge of the Panda?

[rimam1]

Here's the deal, I had a site that's ranking pretty well for lots of terms. I heard about a plugin called Search Terms Tagging 2 and installed it. I installed that plugin exactly 2 weeks ago and it's caused me nothing but problems.

First it started randomly published older posts (I thought my site was hacked), then my site tanked for ALL of my keywords. It's been 2 weeks and I've updated my robots.txt file to de-index the tag pages that the plugin created and deleted the plugin. Despite this, no return in rankings yet. According to the email from the guy who recommended it to me, the same thing happened to him and his site did come back after a week or so.

Here are my questions:

1). Should I wait it out?

2). Should I de-index this site and create a new one with the top posts from this site? I don't think duplicate content will be an issue if I completely de-index the original one and re-publish my best posts on the new domain.

3). Should I buy a bunch of exact match domains correlating to my top posts and just publish them as individual sites with one or two pages and SEO them?

Anyone else been hit by the Search Terms Tagging 2 plugin?

Thanks,
Raza

[xylement]

I'm using this plugin but I disable the promote old post function. It works well for me. I got more traffic from Google by using this plugin. No problems so far =)

[yukon]

First STT2 is far from a "Rogue WP Plugin", in fact it sounds like the plugin did exactly what you told it to do (plugin Admin. settings).

Really it would have helped you a lot to research the plugin & test on a disposible site that is used for testing only, before going live on your money sites.

Test everything on disposible domains...

Just about everything related to the STT2 plugin are covered in this thread here http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...on-plugin.html

I did notice their is a newer version of STT2 on the Wordpress plugin download page, I only see a couple of very minor tweaks in the Admin, for viewing results of the plugin on the backend of WP. Double check for any footprints in the html code.

As far as Google, fix the plugin settings like you want them, then carry on & let Google self correct with your updated pages. Assumes your site pages are active (cached/crawled on a regular basis).

[yukon]

BTW, STT2 is an awesome plugin!

[rimam1]

I agree, testing would have helped.

The question is now that I've updated my robots.txt to not include the offending duplicate tag pages the plugin creates (in addition to deleting the thing entirely), can I expect a return in rankings soon, or should I just move my best content to a new domain and scrap this one?

I can share the site with you via PM if anyone's curious.

Best,
Raza

[rimam1]

Edit




Maybe you SEO experts can help me interpret this:

I did a site: search and noticed that my tag pages are appearing in the search results. According to the plugin creator, this creates a major problem due to duplicate content, thin content, etc. Now, I did exclude the tag pages in my robots.txt, in addition to deleting the plugin.

The site is cached often (last cached on Friday September 16th) so I can't figure out why those tag pages haven't dropped out of the index.

I did also delete a bunch of category pages from my site a few weeks ago, which had no negative impact on my rankings. However, I do see those pages appearing as crawl errors in Webmaster Tools. Should I do something about them?

Thanks,
Raza