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Warning: the Seraphinite Accelerator WordPress plugin will trash your rankings

After removing it from one of our sites, our rankings rebounded straight to the top of Google.

Some of you may remember my post from a couple of months ago, where I shared a near-perfect 98 Lighthouse performance score. It was incredible. Greatest day ever. Or was it?

The consultant I hired achieved this with the Seraphinite Accelerator WordPress plugin.

It was great to get these scores, but honestly, our rankings seemed to get worse. I know that site speed isn't going to be any kind of ranking booster, but things started heading in the wrong direction after doing this speed optimization.

And there were other signs that something was wrong. Using the SEO Pro extension, we could see pages flip from a 503 status to 200 shortly after page load. It looked like the server was initially returning a 503, and then it would load the page and return a 200. Weird.

On a hunch, we removed the plugin on June 2nd and BOOM, rankings took off the next day.

So yeah, don't use that plugin. Tell all your friends.

submitted by /u/darrenshaw_
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/7mw6jtN
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