Plugin Causes Google Penalty

  • Juba

    (@brightonseo)


    9 years ago

    Just a word of caution to plugin users.
    The plugin has a habit of blocking Googlebot and returns excessive errors in Webmaster Tools which resulted in my first page rank being completely removed and now the site no longer appears in SERPS.
    For those who rely on Google rankings to generate revenue, this plugin could destroy any chance you have unless the developers come up with something that will not get in the way of crawlers.
    PS, I allow the bots to crawl everything so it’s not the Robots txt file but what iThemes writes to the htacess file.

    Developers, you need to fix this or come up with something that remedies this problem because it damages websites in Google.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • iThemes Support

    (@ithemes-support)

    9 years ago

    Hey Brightonseo,

    If you disable the default blacklist does that help? I’m curious if this is causing an issue for you. We’re planning on getting this updated to be more efficient.

    Thanks,

    Gerroald

    Thread Starter Juba

    (@brightonseo)

    9 years ago

    Sadly, I’ve had to delete the plugin from my sites as it’s just crazy to take such a risk.
    I hope you get it fixed for other users though because it simply destroys businesses.

    Mitch Menghi

    (@menkom)

    9 years ago

    WOW this is bad if that is the case, can iThemes please test this and confirm if this is infact an issue…. dont rely on us users to be guinea pigs and see if it breaks websites like this…

    Do your due diligence and report back if this is infact an issue.

    Cheers.

    Thread Starter Juba

    (@brightonseo)

    9 years ago

    It is the case menkom. it’s been a week and the site has still not appeared on Google. It was #4 on first page before this debacle.
    As you can imagine, i’ve gone past the stage of caring anymore as this plugin has destroyed the hard work and effort to get there.
    Even if it does recover, i doubt it will attain the same rank.

    Seeing as the plugin blocks Google from crawling the site, I suppose the one thing that’s good is that you’ll never be hit by Panda or Penguin because you’re not in Google anyway.:)

    I now use Cloudflare for all my sites and I advise others to follow this idea because using this iThemes plugin is very dangerous and just not worth the risk.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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