by Neil Curtis on March 27, 2014
Don’t install ‘FREE’ premium WordPress plugins and Google penalties
Unmasking “Free” Premium WordPress Plugins – by SUCURI blog
If you use WordPress you probably use plugins. Plugins help add increased functionality to our WordPress websites and make tricky jobs easier. While there are some nice free plugins around there are also some paid for plugins, or premium plugins as they are often called. Have you have felt like finding a ‘free’ version of one of these premium plugins, because the chances are that there will be on somewhere on the web. STOP! Maybe you should think twice about doing this.
Don’t take my word for it though, you should read an article by Denis Sinegubko on the SUCURI blog. Here several ‘free’ versions of premium WordPress plugins are looked at and their secret effects on WordPress websites are assessed. It makes pretty worrying reading, with plugins adding hidden code to your website that creates new users with admin abilities so the hackers can access your dashboard whenever they like. Others spam out emails on your behalf. This article should stop you installing a free version of a paid for WordPress plugin.
Direct link to the full article: http://blog.sucuri.net/2014/03/unmasking-free-premium-wordpress-plugins.html
After a Link-Based Penalty is Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase? – on MOZ
MOZ seem to be featuring a lot at the moment on my Posts of the Day, but they have a large group of writers who post some really great articles. An article by Marie Haynes looks at what happens when you get a manual Google penalty on your website, but more importantly, what happens when you address the issues and get this penalty removed.
You’d expect any loss in organic Google traffic to return, wouldn’t you? We’ll not necessarily, and in fact probably not. The unfortunate fact is that if you used some SEO company to generate a lot of low quality links for you (which they may well have done even if they say they did not), then these could well be the links that got you penalised. However, while once giving you a boost in the search rankings these links are now useless, so removing them makes your website look better to Google, but it does not add any benefits in terms of ranking. There are exceptions however, and the article on MOZ looks over a few case studies.
Direct link to this article: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase
Summary
Today’s (27th March 2014) Posts of the Day discuss WordPress plugins and Google penalties. The messages are pretty clear, be very careful when installing WordPress plugins that you got for free but are meant to be paid for, and build natural links using good SEO methods rather than outsourcing to an SEO expert who will generate lots of links for you using bookmarking, artificial tiered link building etc.
To get a weekly round-up of all the weeks Posts of the Day along with other updates from this website join my email list.
