Michiel Heijmans

Hi Patrick,

Have you checked these possible solutions:
https://kb.yoast.com/article/123-xml-sitemap-errors

I hope that’ll fix it. Seems like a custom post type that doesn’t need a sitemap, that filter_group – are you sure there is valuable information in there that you want indexed? Isn’t it something you’d like to exclude at WordPress SEO > XML sitemap (bottom of the page)?

Hope that helps!

And thanks, suntravel12. A forum tip is always to add it to a subdomain, so the user generated content on the forum doesn’t interfere with your own content’s SEO.

Sorry Andrew. It’s just nice to know what website we are talking about. But I get your point.

So, and correct me if I am wrong, you created a robots.txt and lost rankings?

Our plugin doesn’t tell you to create one, it helps you manage one. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, that isn’t something the plugin requires at all to work.

Regarding the penalty waiting to happen: Panda isn’t just about banners, it’s about quality websites. With all the moving parts that look like banners as well, and the 90’s design, my personal opinion is that Google might consider it low quality – regardless of what I think about the website myself, let that be clear.

But back to your question: I really don’t think WordPress SEO did this, and you tell me as well robots.txt did this.

To be honest, one look at your site tells me you have all you need for a Google penalty.. [Link redacted] is flooded with banners and ads. I think the update happened to be around the time Google started to dislike your website…

Duplicate entry: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/worst-ever-seo

To my best knowledge, our plugin doesn’t alter the robots.txt file? Could you tell us step by step what happened and what you feel the plugin changed?