WordPress Plugins Do They Cause SEO Damage?

Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

Not familiar with every WordPress plugin can indicate which ones probably OK etc…

On this website as of June 2014 I use

Akismet – SPAM, Stallion includes some SPAM features as well.
Broken Link Checker – find broken links.
EWWW Image Optimizer – optimize images, important for performance.
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded – Comment notifications to commenters
W3 Total Cache – cache plugin, important for performance.
WP-Optimize – Optimizes the database, performance again.

Google XML Sitemaps – customized version (not available to others yet) I’m testing, my version outputs a sitemap including the Stallion SEO Super Comments https://stallion-theme.co.uk/sitemap.xml not sure if this is a good SEO feature yet.

I’m moving posts and comments from other sites here, so using:
Post Type Switcher – changes posts to pages or pages to posts, will disable when done. Pretty much converting most Pages to Posts as WordPress has more features for Posts.

Move WordPress Comments – Move comments around
Tako Movable Comments – Another move comments around

I get a lot of comments in the wrong posts, I move them to better niched posts, so find the above plugins invaluable.

Features not part of Stallion Responsive and probably not SEO damaging.
Contact Form Manager
UpdraftPlus Backup / Restore
LWP show more
WP Super Cache – I’ve used it, it’s OK, I use W3 Total Cache as it’s better, has better Google performance features.

These features exist in Stallion Responsive
Post Tags and Categories for Pages – Tags are part of Pages in Stallion, though Pages aren’t categorized.
Custom Sidebars – Stallion has a similar feature Display Widgets (under Stallion Layout options to turn on)
Google+ Author Information in Search Results (Free Version) – Stallion Promotion Options
Get the Image – thumbnails part of Stallion, under Stallion Colour Options
YouTube channel gallery – there’s a Stallion YouTube RSS feed widget
AddThis social bookmarking widget – major like buttons part of Stallion – Stallion Promotion Options
Add Meta Tags – Stallion has advanced title tag and meta tag support (SEO Advanced Options), so best to avoid this sort of plugin. I still need to find an opengraph solution I like, ones I’ve looked at I’m not happy with the output.

not sure about these, depends how you use them.

Jetpack which shows Site stats too.
JM Twitter cards
JW player plugin for video player – probably OK

JetPack has interesting features, but comes with a lot of baggage, so I’ve avoided it.

Menu swapper – sounds interesting that would be a nice feature to have as part of Stallion. Although Stallion includes multiple theme location (4 of them) you can only set one custom menu for each location. Would be very useful SEO wise to be able to set a different menu for different parts of the site, on this site for example could make sense on the make money categories to not have all the SEO Tutorial links on the top navigation menu. will have to check that one out.

David