WordPress 2.5 & Crawl Rate Tracker Plugin Screws Site SERPS

WordPress Crawl Rate Tracker Plugin chewed my site in Google in the worst possible way! Invisibly! It’s currently causing a major indexing problem for Googlebot when indexing this site:

Update – There is now a fix, apparently at Bloke.

So I headed over to Smart IT to view my website as GoogleBot and was kinda horrified to see this:

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GET Header sent to the bot [Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)]:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:53:09 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Fedora)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=07ojsncpdot7oveppi6s5ivc16; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT

Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Length: 55
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Table ‘hobo_web_co_uk.hobo_wp_sbtracking’ doesn’t exist

————

….especially when my browser returned this!

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HEAD Header sent to the browser [Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13]:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:53:08 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Fedora)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6

Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=fe9ftnfokqe6bfi49ou4gla1r5; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
X-Pingback: http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/xmlrpc.php
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

————

Yeah – the page was returned A-OK to the browser. After a quick look around I discovered it was only Googlebot having major problems with something on my site. It’s the latest version of WordPress.

Now I am no plugin expert for WordPress, and I didnt even expect such a thing. So perhaps this is down to my ignorance, or caused by different plugins, but when I turned off Patrick’s (Blogstorm) WordPress Crawl Rate Tracker Plugin the problem went away and now Google seems to read the page ok. Again, I don’t even know if it is because of something I did, like changing Table Prefixes, the bespoke connections-based template or something – hands up – I might have caused this.

But I thought I’d let people know about these problems with Google, the plugin and the latest version of WP (Version 2.5) in case their site too, is slowly being mangled in Google without them knowing about it, wether it is a bug in the program or if it is just down to a shoddy site upgrade and WP install….by me!

Update – My Webmasterworld buddy Tedster picked out the reason for the internal WP error too – Thanks Ted and offered me the following advice (note I moved the very bottom mozilla line to two lines because it was messing my design);

I assume that plug-in keyed off the user agent string. You can use Firefox with the User Agent Switcher to visit your site and give it a checkup for how it’s treating the spiders. Set the user agent options for these strings:

Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Yahoo!+Slurp;+http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
msnbot/1.0+(+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Mozilla/2.0+(compatible;+Ask+Jeeves/Teoma;
++http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml)

*** Update – Unfortunately it is not just this site – other people are having issues.

Written by Shaun Anderson