Serious SEO issue in popular Wordpress plugin

Filed as News on September 17, 2006 12:01 pm

Darren McLaughlin over at Blog Republic has a rather alarming post regarding the widely used Democracy plugin for Wordpress. The plugin, who in fact is a nice and fancy Ajax poll, is bound to give you serious issues with Google unless you apply a quick fix.

It appears that the plugin append a string to your URL for every page on your blog with the plugin, and this in turn makes Google index twice the number of pages. This just keeps going and going which Darren describes a lot better than I do.

So what can happen? Well, Google is pretty strict on these things and you’ll surely se your PageRank drop, as well as getting omitted search result served. Not good, not good indeed.

The plugin author, Andrew Sutherland, has yet to address this issue on his blog, but Darren points out a fairly easy fix if you don’t want to wait for Andrews (probable) fix. Either way you really should do something if you run the Democracy plugin!

Via Heather McLaughlin

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Thord Daniel Hedengren

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  1. By Duncan posted on September 17, 2006 at 10:49 pm
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    But alas, this is but one of two flaws in the plugin, the second one being so bad no one wants to talk about it, indeed I won’t mention it here, suffice to say though this one is minor in comparison.

  2. By Thord Hedengren posted on September 18, 2006 at 2:58 am
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    Then enlighten us, oh wise one!

  3. TrackbackWeblog Tools Collection » Issue in Democracy PluginIssues with Democracy for Wordpress