WordPress SEO Plugin Reviews

I recently fell into reviewing the new Yoast WordPress SEO plugin: wasn’t my plan to review it, but the Yoast plugin author was condescending towards my SEO abilities and the Talian 05 theme on a WordPress mailing list, being petty I gave it an honest review.

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review

Reviewing the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin inevitably led to reviewing the All In One SEO Pack WordPress plugin as well.

All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin Review

I think I’ll review the other popular WordPress SEO plugins as well as it was very interesting to see what they were trying to achieve (got some new ideas for my WordPress SEO Theme Talian 05).

My conclusion of both SEO plugins was they are very dangerous SEO wise in the wrong hands (those who don’t understand SEO), especially the Yoast SEO plugin as it uses nofollow for blocking link benefit/PR wastage despite the nofollow technique no longer working (it deletes links benefit : AKA damaging SEO wise if you use nofollow, been this way for years).

Don’t use nofollow, take a read of SEO Nofollow PR Sculpting as to why nofollow is bad SEO.

WordPress SEO Plugins and Title Elements

The only redeeming SEO feature of both WordPress SEO plugins is the ability to manipulate a WordPress site’s title elements: you might know them as title tags, but they aren’t tags, they are elements (yes, I’ve become an HTML snob in me old age ).

Both SEO plugins allow the user to change the title ELEMENTS of every page of a WordPress site either site-wide or page by page.

Just looking at WordPress posts, most WordPress themes use this format for a title element

Blog Name | Title of Post

Which is far from ideal, the perfect SEO title element would be:

Title of Post

Assuming you’ve used relevant keywords as part of the title. If you create a post about how great oranges taste and call it “What a Great Morning I Had” rather than something like “Oranges Taste Great” you should not be surprised if that page does not rank well in Google etc… for Orange related search results (you must use the keywords in the title, it’s basic SEO 101).

The site-wide feature was easy to achieve with my Talian 05 theme (all my WordPress SEO themes), you will note the title element of this post is just the title of the post “WordPress SEO Plugin Reviews” (been using this technique on all my SEO themes for about 5 years, believe I was the first to use it with WordPress themes).

Note: despite the title of a post alone being the perfect SEO title element, (assuming the user added keywords to the title) SEO plugins tend to use this default format in their WordPress plugins (note: the Yoast SEO plugin lacks defaults altogether so far, it’s in beta release mind you):

Title of Post | Blog Name

Which isn’t much of an improvement, I wouldn’t install a WordPress plugin just to do that! I personally would only use that format on a site where branding is as important as search engine optimization (I don’t own a site where branding is that important). If Amazon built a WordPress blog you’d understand they’d want Amazon highly featured on every page, but for us mere mortals we don’t have the budget for mass brand marketing and so we shouldn’t waste important SEO real estate (the title element is the most important on page SEO factor) on branding when we don’t have a brand**. We should concentrate on search engine optimization for our traffic.

** Not got anything against branding a domain, but if you’ve named your blog with a brand type name (like Amazon Blog) your home page will be branded and most likely to pull in your brand name SERPs anyway. It’s overkill to brand every page of a site when branding isn’t important traffic wise (do you have a brand that results in thousands of Google searches a day? No, don’t brand every page then).

Anyway, the page by page aspect of the title element manipulation would be difficult to achieve at theme level. I don’t see the need for this page by page title element SEO feature, name a post using relevant keywords (like the Orange example above) which means there’s no reason to change the title element via an SEO plugin and even if I named a post incorrectly you can easily go back and change the title later (I do this all the time), which changes the title element automatically.

All this being said if you don’t use a theme with built in search engine optimized titles (like any of the WordPress SEO themes on this site including the free ones) I can see these SEO plugins have value in being able to set your WordPress posts to:

Title of Post

I’ve only covered WordPress posts above, the same concept is true for WordPress static Pages, Categories, Tags and Search Results. In my SEO themes all are search engine optimized, why not download one of my free WordPress SEO/AdSense themes (Beautiful Sunrise or the Naruto Strikes Back themes for examples) and load the header.php file in a text editor to see how I did it. Talian 05 uses the same code for the titles.

WordPress SEO Plugin Features Nofollow and Noindex

After the title element manipulation as explained above, the next most important SEO feature of these plugins is to try to sculpt PR/link benefit. I say try because they fail miserably and damage a sites SEO in the process!

The Yoast SEO plugin uses a combination of nofollow and noindex to manipulate link benefit/PR flow through a WordPress site and the All In One SEO Pack plugin uses noindex alone.

Both techniques are seriously flawed, especially using the nofollow attribute as nofollow doesn’t protect PR/link benefit it deletes it!!!

Trust me on this one, DO NOT deliberately add any nofollow links to your site, it’s SERPs suicide! If you don’t want your link benefit, send it me (link to my site) instead of deleting it through nofollow!

Noindex on the other hand isn’t as bad as using nofollow, but it is SEO damaging all the same. When you select a page for noindex what the major search engines do is as follows.

They spider the page, but don’t index it (it can’t be found for relevant SERPs in Google etc…).
They follow links from the noindex page and pass link benefit from the page through those links to other pages of your site.

Nofollow in comparison does neither of the above and deletes the link benefit that would have gone to the page that’s nofollowed (everything about nofollow is bad, don’t use it).

With noindex the link benefit that goes to a noindex page does nothing SEO wise on THAT page. Basically the link benefit ‘passes through’ noindex pages, but it doesn’t gain SERPs for those noindex pages. To use an extreme example imagine you noindexed your home page, you would pretty much loose every SERP your home page had, but your deeper pages would still gain the link benefit from links from your home page and rank the same.

If while reading the above you thought “why would I want to noindex my home page, it’s an important page traffic wise?” Fortunately you understand SEO better than your average WordPress SEO plugin author as the plugin authors allow you to noindex category pages which are like mini home pages within your site!!! Why would you want to noindex your Category pages when they can generate search engine traffic?

Don’t believe me about Categories, check out these SERPs in Google for exact Category title searches for this website:

AdSense Blogspot Templates : 2nd in Google
AdSense WordPress Themes : 7th in Google
Clickbank WordPress Themes : 4th in Google
Free AdSense WordPress Theme : 12th in Google
WordPress SEO Plugins : No idea, new category and have a page dedicated to that SERP so probably won’t rank high.
WordPress Solutions : Not in top 20

If I noindex all my Category pages with one of these WordPress SEO plugins I’d loose all those SERPs and many more for no SEO gain (the link benefit isn’t recycled elsewhere on the site, it’s just not used on those pages). As there’s no SEO gain, why noindex them?

If you find a set of pages like your monthly archive pages aren’t generating SEO traffic, you’d be advised by these SEO plugins to noindex them. My advice is if these pages don’t work for your site, remove them completely (don’t link to them at all, remove the monthly archive widget from your sidebar) or at least limit the amount of link benefit they use (the latter is easily achieved at theme level by only linking to them from the home page, not ideal but better than site-wide links).

If you noindex monthly archive pages you’ll gain ZERO SEO benefit from this, the archive pages generate very little (if any) search engine traffic, there would be no improvement in noindexing them as the link benefit still passes through them. If you aren’t going to remove pointless pages like the monthly archives the best advice is don’t noindex them and certainly don’t nofollow them.

Never use nofollow (hope it’s sinking in ).

How To Sculpt PageRank, Link Benefit with SEO Plugins

The bad news is I haven’t found a WordPress SEO plugin that can effectively sculpt PageRank/link benefit (nofollow is very damaging, noindex is damaging). Currently the only legitimate way to sculpt PageRank/link benefit is don’t link (or at least limit links) to unimportant pages.

Future good news is by looking through these WordPress SEO plugins and realising how important the ability to block pages from Google etc… is to some WordPress users (not an issue for me so never worried about it, if I don’t want a page indexing I don’t create it in the first place) I’ve had a Eureka moment and realised a way to both block pages from being indexed AND not waste the precious link benefit that would go through the pages whilst still allowing link benefit to flow through a site (it’s official, I’m a WordPress SEO genious ).

I have a couple of months of SEO testing to do before I’ll release this as part of the Talian 05 theme (after I code it in the theme), but through luck I already have data on this SEO concept and it’s looking very good so far.

When complete users should be able to do the equivalent of noindex Monthly Archives, Categories, Tags and the paged home page archives (page 2, page 3 etc… linked from the home page) whilst having the link benefit redirected to the home page. Note: I personally wouldn’t use this SEO feature on Categories or Tag pages, but would recommend using on the monthly archives (which I never use) and use it myself on the home page paged archives as they don’t add any SEO value to a site if you have Categories and/or Tags: you need at least one form of archive page like Categories and/or Tags to pass link benefit through a site, but you don’t need four types (Categories, Tags, Monthly Archives and the paged home page archives). I tend to use Categories for passing link benefit through a site and rarely Tags (if a Tags worth creating, I usually create a Category).

If I had the PHP skills to put this concept into a new WordPress SEO plugin I would as in combination with the ability to rewrite title elements (like the two WordPress SEO plugins I’ve reviewed offer) would make the major WordPress SEO plugins I’ve reviewed obsolete. My eldest son is at University studying computer programming, will see if I can persuade him to run me off a plugin (he thinks PHP programming isn’t pure enough, programming snob with his C++ code ).

Watch this space

David Law