Lately, I’ve been looking at SEO plugins to add to our blogging sites as part of a platform building exercise being run by Robert Brewer over at My Name Is Not Bob.  For that same challenge, I installed a share plugin on all our blog sites a couple of weeks ago.

Today, we discovered that the share plugin was putting banner type ads at the top of the page whenever anyone followed the links from Facebook.  There was nothing obvious in the plugin setup instructions to indicate they intended to do this and it didn’t start occurring right away.  Since I’ve been very busy lately and was away from the computer most of this past weekend, I’m not sure when it started and I apologize to anyone who found this activity annoying.

Aside from the fact that I don’t appreciate someone installing ad-ware without telling me upfront that it is going to happen, I was concerned by the fact that I had no personal control over the content or positioning of the ads and wasn’t offered any benefit other than the use of the plugin.  I would have been willing to pay a reasonable fee to get the plugin ad free, but I couldn’t find anywhere to do that either.

So, I am now also looking at sharing plugins in addition to SEO plugins.   I’ll be testing them out for a couple of weeks to see which ones work best for our purposes.  I plan to install a different one on each blog and let them run for a couple of weeks to see what they do since I’ve been stung once.  This may result in frequent changes to the look of the posts for a while.  Bear with us.  When I find something that is simple for us to use while being convenient for our readers, I will promote it on all the sites.

If you are a WordPress user and have a recommendation, mention it in the comments below.  All advice is appreciated.