I’ve encountered worrying problems which I’d like to present to you

Hello WPMU DEV

I’m writing to you about your Smartcrawl Free plugin.

I’ve encountered a number of very worrying problems with your Smartcrawl plugin, which I’d like to present to you.

To begin with, I don’t know what happened, but this plugin started by bringing up my articles in the search results, but unfortunately I deactivated it to use another one, because I encountered these problems on my site:

1- Major indexing problem

All de-indexed pages or URLs end up in the search results. Yes, that’s what happened. The Privacy Policy page, the Terms of Use page, the Cookies page, the Newsletter page and dozens of other pages that I carefully de-indexed, one by one, all ended up on Google.

And that’s not all. In the Title and Meta settings, all the Custom Post Types and even the Article Tags I had de-indexed all showed up in the search results. I went back into the settings to double-check, and the boxes were unchecked.

Basically, the plugin simply indexed the whole site, regardless of the settings. So I was forced to write code to de-index any parts of the site that should never end up in search results.

2- Structured Data Video problems detected

For Schema Video, Google has detected two Structured Data problems.
A Critical problem described as a ?Missing “uploadDate” field?, and a non-critical problem described as a ?Missing “description” field?.

3- User-declared canonical problem

All articles indexed by Google after plugin activation do not display a user-declared canonical URL. After inspecting a URL, the result is as follows: User-declared canonical: None. I don’t know if this last point is a problem, but it’s something I’ve never seen before with other plugins I’ve used.

Best Regards.