Meta tags - removal

[copykatrecipes]

A couple of months ago, I did something that has caused me great angst.  My website unique visitors was on a steady growth path for about 3 years.

I swapped out my SEO plugin, from all-in-one, to Yoast.   I then removed all of my meta tags.   My site has about 2000 unique posts.  After doing that my unique visitors has been on a steady decline of me loosing traffic at a rate of 5 to 10% of my visits.

Any thoughts on the best remediation plan I should use.  I put back in the meta tags, but wasn't sure of the SEO plugin switch caused the issue.

[CommT]

Hello Stephanie,

I would wait and see if re-instating the meta tags fixes the problem.

I would resubmit your sitemap(s) to webmaster tools and do the fetch as google thing in webmaster tools. These should get googlebot to pay your site a visit to reindex all those meta tags. Then wait for a week, and see if your listings/unique visitor numbers increases.

If this doesn't help, then I'm a bit stumped, because in all honesty the yoast plugin pisses all over the all in one pack - I've used both and in my experience yoast is the best wordpress plugin for seo - nothing else comes close.

Listings drop for all sorts of reasons, and I have to say, it would be highly unusual for a plugin to cause such a thing to happen - similarly, meta tags shouldn't really affect rankings too much. If they affect anything on your site it would be CTR (if these are meta descriptions you're talking about), which could be the reason your unique visitors have reduced.

All the best,

Amelia

[rajeevpanwar]

Hi Stephanie Manley

You can use another wordpress plugin who can generate automatic meta tag, it will be 50% help to get back traffic ,

Thanks

[copykatrecipes]

Actually, I just added back the meta tags to the old posts, when I clicked the button to use them, it populated the old tags.   I refreshed, and resubmitted the sitemap, and google already picked it up and freshed via the new updated sitemap.

Thanks for the tips!

[AlanMosley]

Yes put back the meta tags, and wait.
but I am not convinced that your drop in visits was cased by this.