Why I Deleted the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 WordPress Plugin

For the longest time, I was using the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 plugin created by Purwedi Kurniawan, a plugin designed to strengthen your on-page SEO.  And for the longest time, I thought that this was one of the most effective plugins known to man.  I swore by it!  I witnessed first hand how it could multiply blog traffic pretty much overnight.  This was one of my favorite WordPress plugins.  But then the latest Google Panda and Penguin updates came along and changed everything.

First things first…How this plugin works

Before I get ahead of myself, let me first explain what this plugin really is for those who are researching whether or not they should install it on their own blog.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 is a plugin that automatically collects and displays search terms that users are using when they arrive at your blog post or page.  It essentially creates a list-style tag cloud that it positioned at the bottom of your blog post.  But instead of a whole collection of individual tags, it provides a collection of the most popular keywords.  Additionally, this plugin will republish posts that have not received traffic to ensure that they do in fact get indexed by the search engines.

How this plugin worked for me…

This plugin was fantastic and extremely effective, and it multiplied my traffic in a matter of weeks.

For example, more than a year ago, I wrote a review on a “making money online” program that was growing in popularity.  While this review was generating some traffic, it was not as much as I had hoped for.  I then came across the SEO SearchTerms Tagging plugin.  Within a few days, someone came across that review after searching for a product that was similar, but not completely related.  The plugin collected this keyword and began displaying it as anchor text.  By chance, Google immediately re-crawled that review, found the keyword, and began indexing my review high in their SERPS under that particular search query.  A review that was once generating a few hundred hits per month grew to a few thousand.  All because this plugin collected and displayed that high-traffic keyword.

But I don’t use it anymore…

Since Google has been changing the SEO world with their latest Panda and Penguin search engine updates, this blog has taken a severe beating.  In an effort to get back in the good graces of Google, I have been researching and finding possible reasons on why my site traffic has suffered.  Since SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 can be argued as being a sort of “blackhat” SEO technique, I believe that it was one of the many culprits behind this blog’s falling in the SERPS.

If you have been using this plugin and noticed a severe dip in traffic, I would recommend deleting it from your list of WordPress Plugins.  If you are researching this plugin as a possible tool for your blog, I would avoid it.

In fact, I have learned to stay away from any plugin that automatically generates any sort of SEO capability.  They might work for a short period of time, but eventually, Google will find a way to penalize these sort of blackhat techniques.  If what you are doing is not natural in the eyes of the search engines, or if you are using SEO type plugins that give the appearance of doing things naturally, I would stop using and delete them immediately.

Like I said, SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 was a fantastic plugin that worked extremely well on my blog.  And I have nothing against this plugin, nor the author that created it.  But it is just not a smart plugin to use since Google came out with their latest Panda and Penguin updates.

Category: WordPress