Sites with Generatepress penalized by Google?

September update was "helpful content update" and so if your website is hit by this then you must do a content audit for your website because Google has clearly mentioned in their announcement that it is a site-wide signal and it evaluates if your website has unhelpful content or not. Website theme is not expected to be the exact reason for getting hit by this update unless you have not removed the default or dummy pages that comes along with the theme or getting generated due to any functionality. This check do not apply to one theme but on all themes, and all platforms. You just need to make sure that you keep as much as quality informative content on your website. So just evaluate all parts of the website that are getting indexed or crawled by Google.
Reference - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/helpful-content-system

Any actual evidence to back this up?

Generate press is used by a lot of ppl including spammers.

I may have to switch to another theme if this is the case.

Rollfic said:

How can a theme cause penalty? LOL

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A theme like generatepress can cause penalty for many reasons but the main one is cloaking.
Googlebot visits a website using different bots. For example, if a website displays one version of a page to Googlebot (the search engine crawler) and a different version to human visitors, this is considered cloaking.
in WordPress, if a theme is designed to change the content based on media size (like desktop, tablet, or mobile), it can alter the appearance and even the structure of a webpage depending on the device being used. This is typically done through responsive design techniques using CSS media queries or JavaScript. For example, a theme might display a different header, footer, or navigation menu on mobile devices compared to desktops.

bloupdot said:

A theme like generatepress can cause penalty for many reasons but the main one is cloaking.
Googlebot visits a website using different bots. For example, if a website displays one version of a page to Googlebot (the search engine crawler) and a different version to human visitors, this is considered cloaking.
in WordPress, if a theme is designed to change the content based on media size (like desktop, tablet, or mobile), it can alter the appearance and even the structure of a webpage depending on the device being used. This is typically done through responsive design techniques using CSS media queries or JavaScript. For example, a theme might display a different header, footer, or navigation menu on mobile devices compared to desktops.

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But all themes today are responsive.

Alf85 said:

But all themes today are responsive.

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If you have outbound links to twitter without nofollow (and even with nofollow), i wonder if the new behavior of x com can also be responsible for it. When the user visits x com, it returns the login page while when googlebot visits the x com page it crawls it.
So, x com is doing cloaking, especially for adult twitter accounts. Maybe reddit does the same. I think the behavior is quite harsh for twitter accounts that are considered to be adult or with sensitive content.

For your information, I also noticed a google penalty against my website using the theme generate press.
I recovered and i want to explain how I did it because the cause may be two things.
First, I removed the widget with link to my twitter account and the link to reddit account on every page. Both (x . com) and reddit are cloaking. They send users to login page and sends googlebot to the main page of tweets.
Secondly, I discovered that in the list of widget areas, my left sidebar area was full of external links. However, i don't use the left sidebar anywhere on my website. So, i deleted all widgets of the left sidebar.
Then, 3 days after doing the change, the following happened.
So, I think the problem was either related to reddit/x links or left sidebar.
My x.com account has adult content. I don't know if it makes any difference. So, now, I will add my link to twitter account behind javascript just in case to hide it.
so if you guys identify the root cause let me know.

bloupdot said:

For your information, I also noticed a google penalty against my website using the theme generate press.
I recovered and i want to explain how I did it because the cause may be two things.
First, I removed the widget with link to my twitter account and the link to reddit account on every page. Both (x . com) and reddit are cloaking. They send users to login page and sends googlebot to the main page of tweets.
Secondly, I discovered that in the list of widget areas, my left sidebar area was full of external links. However, i don't use the left sidebar anywhere on my website. So, i deleted all widgets of the left sidebar.
Then, 3 days after doing the change, the following happened.
So, I think the problem was either related to reddit/x links or left sidebar.
My x.com account has adult content. I don't know if it makes any difference. So, now, I will add my link to twitter account behind javascript just in case to hide it.
so if you guys identify the root cause let me know.

View attachment 369579

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But you still use Generatepress? I don't use neither Twitter nor Reddit and my site still has no traffic from Google.

So you think they penalize WordPress themes? LMAO.

DozeX said:

So you think they penalize WordPress themes? LMAO.

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Wordpress themes are dynamic. They can return any kind of content dependent on the client. Wordpress themes can hide text, links and googlebot may not like it. They may have javascript code with useragent command that returns a different content dependent on user-agent.
Everything is possible with wordpress themes.

I don't think that google can consider a theme as a penalty determining factor.

bloupdot said:

If you have outbound links to twitter without nofollow (and even with nofollow), i wonder if the new behavior of x com can also be responsible for it. When the user visits x com, it returns the login page while when googlebot visits the x com page it crawls it.
So, x com is doing cloaking, especially for adult twitter accounts. Maybe reddit does the same. I think the behavior is quite harsh for twitter accounts that are considered to be adult or with sensitive content.

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I reckon it is the August Google update.