[Your thoughts] SEO plugins or let google decide?

ATuringtest

ATuringtest

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I've seen a few articles lately about ditching SEO plugins.
The main reasons seem to be meta descriptions and site speed.
I do subscribe to the less is best when it comes to plugins, and of course after the Yoast fuck up, the less can go wrong philosophy.
The meta argument is intriguing, let google do its job and serve up meta descriptions aimed at the users search.
I'm about to launch a new Mixed site with 100 good articles and test my new social signals back-link algorithm and a new Reddit funnel bot.
Although its been six months of decent hard work, I'm actually very tempted to go O'Natural and let the gods of Google do with it as they see fit.
 
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I partially agree. I rarely modify descriptions, however, title I want to have full control over.

I use All in One SEO and it doesn't slow the site.

It also gives very nice feature or noindex / nofollow with a single click.
 
Yup, I'm a All in One SEO users also. Much more lightweight than others.

Rankmath and Yoast maybe good for beginners, but once you understand the basics I don't see the need for them. Just another thing to go wrong, and Google's algo is good enough to understand content without being prompted these days.
 
On my client sites we use the seo framework paid version, no unwanted feature, make the site fast, full control of meta, title, no index and, properly optimises the post so you can try that
 
ATuringtest said:
I've seen a few articles lately about ditching SEO plugins.
The main reasons seem to be meta descriptions and site speed.
I do subscribe to the less is best when it comes to plugins, and of course after the Yoast fuck up, the less can go wrong philosophy.
The meta argument is intriguing, let google do its job and serve up meta descriptions aimed at the users search.
I'm about to launch a new Mixed site with 100 good articles and test my new social signals back-link algorithm and a new Reddit funnel bot.
Although its been six months of decent hard work, I'm actually very tempted to go O'Natural and let the gods of Google do with it as they see fit.
Click to expand...

what yoast fuck up you referring to? the one from early last year or another thing has happened recently?
 
fb3003 said:
what yoast fuck up you referring to? the one from early last year or another thing has happened recently?
Click to expand...

Was there one recently ? , I didnt use Yoast but I belive there was aproblem with indexing pictures or something early this year ?
 
ATuringtest said:
Was there one recently ? , I didnt use Yoast but I belive there was aproblem with indexing pictures or something early this year ?
Click to expand...


It was last year I believe, but time flies and I do lose track of time.

RankMath had a couple of bugs earlier this year, but as it was totally free, I said at the time that support there would no doubt be limited/nonexistant.

I was speaking to a web dev yesterday about these plugins as I have numerous sites and use several SEO plugins ( obviously only 1 each site ) but these include Yoast, Rank Math, AIO, SEOpress and another is called Squirrily.

Personally I think these like most plugins are based on peoples personal preferences, such as do we go with WP Rocket or W3.

If anyone feels like doing a case study, test I'm sure there'd be a lot of interest to compare say 3 sites but with different SEO plugins.
 
tiiberius said:
I use All in One SEO and it doesn't slow the site.
Click to expand...

All plugins slow the site down. The way plugins work is by injecting filters in each step in Wordpress loop. The way all in one seo plugin changes your title is by intercepting the page and injecting its title on the html. All plugins slow you down, just keep that in mind.
 
tiiberius said:
I partially agree. I rarely modify descriptions, however, title I want to have full control over.

I use All in One SEO and it doesn't slow the site.

It also gives very nice feature or noindex / nofollow with a single click.
Click to expand...

I used to use All in One and switched to RankMath. Now considering going back because my sites seem to be slower and did not even consider it could be RankMath.
 
Since I have an SEOPress lifetime deal I use it but I have seen Google ignore the output of the plugins sometimes anyways
 
MisterF said:
It was last year I believe, but time flies and I do lose track of time.

RankMath had a couple of bugs earlier this year, but as it was totally free, I said at the time that support there would no doubt be limited/nonexistant.

I was speaking to a web dev yesterday about these plugins as I have numerous sites and use several SEO plugins ( obviously only 1 each site ) but these include Yoast, Rank Math, AIO, SEOpress and another is called Squirrily.

Personally I think these like most plugins are based on peoples personal preferences, such as do we go with WP Rocket or W3.

If anyone feels like doing a case study, test I'm sure there'd be a lot of interest to compare say 3 sites but with different SEO plugins.
Click to expand...

Would be a good one for @Festinger ? Although I dont think he has rank-math atm

so it was this video that sorta got me looking into ditching the plugins

img404.jpg
 
Last edited by a moderator:
OlafRustle said:
Since I have an SEOPress lifetime deal I use it but I have seen Google ignore the output of the plugins sometimes anyways
Click to expand...
Yes, it's true... sometimes google ignores meta data for some reason and generates its own but it's not because of the plugins.
Have the same problem in bing now... instead of using meta title it uses page title (H1) in serps for one of my pages.
 
bartosimpsonio said:
All plugins slow the site down. The way plugins work is by injecting filters in each step in Wordpress loop. The way all in one seo plugin changes your title is by intercepting the page and injecting its title on the html. All plugins slow you down, just keep that in mind.
Click to expand...

In case of AIOS it's hardly noticeable.

I would say it's worth it.
 
tiiberius said:
In case of AIOS it's hardly noticeable.

I would say it's worth it.
Click to expand...

Tried many plugins throughout the years. Found most of them disposable.

Yoast was a burden I was especially pleased to get rid of. By the end I only used it for the sitemaps and a few custom tags.
 
bartosimpsonio said:
Tried many plugins throughout the years. Found most of them disposable.

Yoast was a burden I was especially pleased to get rid of. By the end I only used it for the sitemaps and a few custom tags.
Click to expand...

I second the Yoast choice.
 
I use SEOPress just because I am the worst coder in the world, barely know how to write 3 lines of code even if did a high-school in the area, at that time I play better football :D.

If you wonder why:

  • No footprints in the source
  • A simple yet complex structure
  • Light

    BUT, if you want to do ultimate WordPress, just go static. This way you will beat us all, whatever you will do, I am very tempted to do that as well for my agency at least as I rarely modify something.
I agree with @bartosimpsonio, in the end, the bloat will be there whatever you will use, as it's "extra".
 
There is no score bump in page speed insights or gtmetrix if I remove Yoast. I can do without it too at this stage but still easier to quickly check article quality before publishing.
 
Hi
You could search on Google for how plugins affect page load speed. You can debug them one by one using Chrome Dev Tools. You can certainly find faulty ones.

Most of the time, the culprits are plugins that have not been updated to suit the latest version of WP.

The type of SEO plugin used depends on personal choice. But all of them do help in submitting sitemaps within GSC and Bing Webmasters.

Another great benefit of a high quality SEO plugin (not free versions) is the ability to submit structured data markups. These are the new advancements in semantic web that all search engines look for.

PS: Forgot to add, many a time, you may have an awesome meta description well written to describe the article. This is industry best practice along with the title tag. Google is only intent on providing best user experience to searchers in response to their queries.

In this case, if your article has specific paragraphs of content that match the user's query, Google will override your default meta description and show that paragraph of content that answers the user's query.

This is part of the testing that goes along with its machine learning algorithms (read RankBrain)
 
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