When you leave your WordPress blog out of date with respect to the version or the plugin installed, then your blog may encounter strange errors and the error message will be shown in your blog , worst even in the place of main content. This will certainly give a bad experience to the users and even worst for search engines.
Given below is an example for a WordPress plugin error thrown by the social media sharing plugin named social pug.
Just searching the raw error message in Google shows hundreds of thousands results all with the exact error message, but when you check few of the pages, the error messages do not come up LIVE.
But when they were indexed, it was throwing the error. So even when you fix the error in your blog, it takes time to get re-indexed/fixed in Google search results.
See in the below search results how many sites were affected due to this “social pug” plugin error
The easy and best way to fix this is
- Have all your themes and plugins updated. Simple and mostly overlooked solution.
- If you see there is NO new update for your theme or the main plugins (ones show up or operate in the UI, not just in backend) then you should certainly go to the WordPress.org repository and see when it was last updated and if it shows compatible with your version of WordPress (as suggested by the WordPress developer team)
Given below is a snapshot for a plugin which shows the last updated time(3 weeks ago) and the WordPress version up to which it is compatible. So before installing a new plugin , make sure you know the meta details of the plugin
