My 2 cents...draw your own conclusion.
Site is about 5 weeks old, a "fan" site for a celebrity, name is shared by at least 5 other notables
in other fields of endeavor who also rank on goggle.
About 759,000 results from "name" search.
Site started out at either page 12 or 13. With the seo work I did it was moving up 1 page per week, 48 hours ago it was on page 7.
Bought and installed this 'Unique' plugin not quite
48 hours ago. About 24 hours ago added a Google news feed page to site
and a plugin to add the "alt" tag to pictures and such
(not sure I have the parameters set correctly since I don't understand anything per the instructions, lol), nothing else.
12 hours ago did a search, site had moved from page 7, 3 down from top, to page 2, bottom.
I have WP set so that spiders are requested every 24 hours unless a posting is made. I did do a manual ping about 18 hours ago.
So what do you think ? Did the "unique..er" do the trick or not ?
All conclusions are your own !!
Oh,btw, I noticed a slow down in page load also, changed the number of post per page from 10 to 5, speeds seems to be back to normal.
bruiser