John Mueller of Google posted on Twitter "I imagine the top-ranking sites don't use any SEO plugin." This was after someone posted a poll asking "which SEO Plugin is perfect for SEO?"
Here are those tweets:
I imagine the top-ranking sites don't use any SEO plugin.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 29, 2020
What John said here is not that if you use an SEO plugin that you won't rank well. But that you do not need to use SEO plugins to rank well in Google. A lot of top ranking sites do not use SEO plugins, that is probably true. There are probably a lot of other top ranking sites that do use SEO plugins. But you do not need to use an SEO plugin, or any specific kind of SEO plugin, to rank well in Google. That is all John was saying.
But, here are some of the reactions to what John said:
Lots of top sites use WP and so yes, use plugins.
— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) June 29, 2020
I think I understand what you are saying here. But I don't think anyone should discount SEO plugins. Used the right way, they can help a site get top rankings, along with lots of other things.
— Joe Hall 🦡 (@joehall) June 29, 2020
Oh well, some do, but obviously only as a tool inside a set of tools within a strategy.
— stemel (@stemel) June 29, 2020
Easy agile seo implementions vs having to go through developers to make changes to code base = better rankings? Okayy
— johnriddjnr (@johnriddjnr) June 29, 2020
Granted, you're correct that since many top ranking properties belong to Google and never have to worry about competition, you don't NEED to use any SEO plug-ins on them. But we can't all just put ourselves at the top.
— Ethan (@ethanjhulbert) June 29, 2020
You imagine wrong :)
— Jono Alderson (@jonoalderson) June 29, 2020
I agree , the fact of the matter is that all plugins for SEO , just help to 5% website SEO
— Ali Vaezi (@VaeziC) June 29, 2020
John later added:
An SEO plugin won't move your site to the top. There are awesome, well-made plugins out there, but there's more to search than having the right plugin.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 29, 2020
Eg, spammers sometimes use SEO plugins too, but ideally they shouldn't be shown at all. (Lots of plugin-users aren't spammers)
There's definitely room for using off-the-shelf plugins, it can take a lot of work to maintain the same quality of code as a well-done plugin. Make or buy? It's hard to say; sometimes you need something special, or need to be able to tweak things in unique ways.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 29, 2020
Do you use SEO plugins for your sites? Take my Twitter poll:
Do you use SEO plugins on your web sites?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 30, 2020
As an FYI, this is a custom built CMS, so no, this site does not use SEO plugins. But there is a ton of legacy code on here of old supported markup on this site. I really need to free up time from my development team to rebuild this site for many reasons...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
