Funny Google Penguin Observation

I had a site that was doing relativity good in the SERPS right up till the Penguin update when the site completely disappeared.

I have the Wordpress SEO plugin on the site from Yoast. I decide to deactivate it and see what would happen. Boom, within hours the site is back where it was. So now I guess I need to go to all of my sites and do the same. Over 200 sites.

This is getting old. Sigh...

I'm actually just going to deactivate any plugin I have now that is suppose to help with SEO.

I'm using SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 and SEOPressor V4. I'll update this thread with my results.

OMG - I was having the same thoughts yesterday about Yoast !!!

The few pages that are still ranking in the top 200 for me, are ranking for the wrong keywords (??), and I started to suspect that Yoast was the problem.

Put simply, I am only ranking urls for keywords found on other pages (???). Not surprisingly, all of my pages were down at #80 and below (very simple Amazon product names niche) - having previously been top 30 for the correct keywords (Most posts are only a couple of weeks old and solid in SERPS, pre Penguin, with no backlinking - due to lack of serious competition).

I almost replaced it with All in One SEO, but at the last minute backed out, cos I knew that i would have to fill in all of the SEO data.

When you deactivated Yoast, how have you told Google what your keywords, meta data is. Have you transferred that data to all in one, or some other plug in ?

For the moment, I've exported the info from Yoast and deactivated it.

Strangely, Matt Cutts uses Yoast's skills for his own blog - so I'd be really surprised if Penguin has been designed to kill off his plug-in !!

I use Yoast on my site and it's doing just fine. Did you configure everything properly? I don't add no follow to any links internally except for comments and I add noindex to all archiving pages.

Interesting observation. I disable just the meta keywords bit for now. Let's see how things shape up, if it has any affect in the first place.

Did you have optimized titles & descriptions like "Layouts, Free Layouts, Free Sexy Layouts"? I'm assuming it's not the plugin's fault, you disappeared because of over-optimization, it wasn't a filter that targeted the plugin

I suspect it was how I set the plugin up. Once I get more time I'm going to play around with it a bit. I'm also trying some other things, Removing large header graphics, taking out some of my H2 and H3 tags.

I followed Yoasts instructions exactly and it was giving me #1 rankings pre Penguin. So I had no issues with the original set up.

As for over optimization, my KW density was no more than 1.5%. I have already de-optimized some of the pages - but it has made no difference. To be honest, I only had the obvious H1 for the header, alt tag and the KW in the first sentance anyway. That's nothing to what's still on P1 for the KWs I'm targeting.