[Support request] Rankings And Earnings Fall After Using GeneratePress theme

Hi there,

Sorry you’ve been having issues with your site. We work really hard to provide a foundation that sets websites up for success, so I don’t like seeing stuff like this.

That being said, I’m curious what mechanism you think a WordPress theme could provide that would help or hurt things like earnings and rankings? Are you thinking there’s something built into the theme that prevents people from interacting with your ads? If so, I can assure you that’s not the case.

A WordPress theme (regardless of which one you choose) is simply a foundation for your content – its job is to display the content you provide in a way your users can read and interact with, without hindering the performance of your site. That’s what GeneratePress does – it outputs the content you provide using valid HTML and CSS while maintaining the best possible performance to ensure your site is accessible to the widest possible audience.

When it comes to SEO, all we can do is make sure we give you the best possible foundation for your website. That means things like minimal CLS, fastest performance, and accessible content. Beyond that, a theme can’t do much else to hurt (or help) your rankings/interaction. That part is up to Google and your individual users.

You can always compare the differences between your sites using both themes. Look at things like HTML validation, Google Pagespeed Insights, structured data, ad placement, content placement, etc. Find the difference and then tweak things.

If you have something specific you’d like me to investigate, I would be happy to – just let me know. However, my guess is that the changes you’re seeing are simply a coincidence. There’s nothing malicious going on (all of our code is open source), and there’s nothing magic a theme can do to up your earnings/rankings. Google cares about your content above all else.

Thanks!

I don’t have a Semrush account, but if you have any real-world data at all that might be helpful, I’d love to see it. If there was something broken with your website, Google would tell you via Search Console. Is there anything in there? Warnings? Errors? What does Google say via Pagespeed Insights? Any issues there at all? How’s the accessibility of your site when you use GP? Are you able to read/interact with it without any issues?

Did you do any of the comparisons I mentioned above? What’s the difference between your site when using both themes? If you want to use GeneratePress, I would suggest finding that difference. That way we can help you make the necessary adjustments so this isn’t something you have to worry about anymore.

There are simply too many factors that go into things like search engine rankings and earnings. It’s impossible to give any sort of helpful advice without more data.

Hi there,

i checked your site and i am seeing a bunch of errors in the developers Console. There are various errors, related to Advert scripts, CDN requests, CORS issues and requests to the browser localStorage.

If you right click and inspect your site, and check the Console Tab red errors you will see them. As i navigate around your site i see more of them appearing.

In my personal opinion these are more likely to be the issue. As they are related to advert requests and the collection of localStorage Data. Lets assume those error exisisted previously…. Why would changing the theme make a difference? My only thoughts here is that overtime your caches/CDNs had cached many bad script requests and changing theme was a significant enough change to burst the caches.

I would recommend you fix these errors asap.

The first and main error is see is:

N {message: "adsbygoogle.push() error: Only one AdSense head tag supported per page. The second tag is ignored.", name: "TagError", pbr: true, stack: "TagError: adsbygoogle.push() error: Only one AdSen…sbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-"}

Which means you have more than one adsense head tag in your site. For more info you can google: Only one AdSense head tag supported per page

Then theres the:

bundle.js:1 Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.

Which is coming from the admatic CDN – so cookie blocking or some other issue is stopping the admatic script from accessing the browser localStorage. As the CDN is dedicated to Ad serving i would assume that it needs to access localStorage to track use activity.

There are other ‘anonymous’ errors that appear which are related to unable to load resource, those i have no info on as the errors don’t provide any.

In addition under Console > Messages i see a LOT of these warnings being generated:

[Violation] Avoid using document.write(). https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/08/removing-document-write

which if you follow the link in the error explains what problems it causes and the huge impact it has on slow networks.

I cannot say if they existed when using GP, i can only assume they were there. And as to the changing theme – i explained above; i cannot say for certain but clearing caches/CDN may have removed a lot of legacy cached scripts that lead to greater chances of failure.

There isn’t anything in GP that would interfere with how these 3rd party scripts operate in injecting code or collecting data. But as you have a lot of errors on a different theme now you are just at risk of seeing the same failures.

I can only tell you the errors the browser is reporting, – if it says theres two then the google API is detecting two. you can check the browser developers console to confirm that.
The CDN is the adserver – which will be being called by one of the scripts on the site.

Unfortunately i can’t debug those issues, they’re all 3rd party script related that is being added to your site using methods i am unaware of.

Removed

You’re welcome.

Lets look at the info to hand:

1. The Theme does not interfere with the content added to the site. It simply serves as the template for outputting your content. A simple analogy would be your Content are Books and the Theme is the Bookshelf. It would be hard argument to pass that its the bookshelfs fault if the Books are unreadable.

2. The Astra theme was built off of GP’s code. Aside of the ‘other stuff’ they have added it to it – its almost identical in its behaviour.

3. There are script errors in the console related to adverts and the collection of data. It would be wrong for me to not point these out regardless of what theme you’re using, and as the issue is primarily related to the adverts its more likely to be the problem. Particularly this problem:

[Violation] Avoid using document.write(). https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/08/removing-document-writes

As the error docs clearly state the impact it can have on loading times across slow networks.

4. Your site is running an optimizations plugin – a potential issue here is that combined JS files can quickly consume the cache and the sites memory if those caches are not cleared. Which is going to adversely affect its performance. ( Note: Changing Theme would again have required those caches to be cleared ).

5. There are many more variables involved in the site, at a server level and 3rd party servers. If we had visibility of the site during the down turn then we may have been able to advise on these issues ( or others ) before it became a problem. Without sight of them at the time its impossible for us to advise and me listing them here would be pretty pointless. I just hoped to give some insight of what i see.

Overall, we have over 400,000 active installs, and we have helped many sites running adverts achieve better performance. And across all our users i believe we have only had similar issues reported once or twice. If there were an inherent issue with the Theme i am sure we would have 1000’s of users raising the same concern. Its for those reasons and the years of combined experience at GP and its many users that we can confidently say there is no direct link between GP and this issue.

We’re more than happy to investigate the issue further but looking at historic SEMRUSH data or other Analytics won’t provide the technical issues like we have identified today.