I installed the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin on my development server to review it (would never use these so called WordPress SEO plugins on a live site).
First thing I noticed was the description of the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin under the plugins page was: “The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress.” That’s a bit of a sweeping statement, guess I’ll not need any more WordPress plugins that I use for SEO reasons after I’ve reviewed the Yoast SEO Plugin.
I’ll apologise in advance for the length of this review, Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin has a lot of features/options and it’s difficult to review them without explaining the SEO concepts behind the features.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Features
Going to try to go through all the SEO plugins features and give my verdict of their useful/uselessness. First off I tried the plugin with my WordPress 3 Talian Theme which is by far the best SEO WordPress theme available today (guaranteed: if you can find a better SEO WordPress theme I’ll give you $500) and it broke the title of some pages, basically stripped what was in the title element and left a blank title. Tested with the default TwentyTen theme and had the same problem, turns out some settings of the plugin are left blank by default, so to get this plugin working on a live site I strongly suggest you know what you are doing first (test on a development site for example) as many of your titles are going to be blank upon activation of the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin!
When the WordPress SEO Plugin is activated you get a new left menu settings added to your WordPress dashboard, below I’ll review each section.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Dashboard
Settings Advice
I get a red warning: Paging comments is enabled, this is not needed in 999 out of 1000 cases, so the suggestion is to disable it, to do that, simply uncheck the box before “Break comments into pages…”
Hmm, that’s not true of many of my WordPress sites, and this really should have a bit more information describing the advantages and disadvantages of paging comments (since Yoast’s author, Joost de Valk believes is important SEO wise, which it’s not).
If your site doesn’t generate many comments per page it’s true you don’t need to paginate comments. That being said if a page doesn’t have enough comments to generate paginating comments there’s no harm having it turned on (it doesn’t do anything until you have a page with lots of comments).
I have a jokes site with almost 18,000 comments with a few posts having several thousand comments each, imagine all those comment threads on one page, those posts would never fully load!!! My Talian 05 theme sales/support page has 300 comments which I have spread over 5 paginated pages rather than having 300 comments on the one page.
Basically this SEO plugin feature is a waste of time, if your site generates a lot of comment threads you paginate them, if you paginate a site with few comments it makes no difference. I set all my sites to paginate at 25 or 50 comment threads per page by default, if it becomes popular it’s ready for thousands of comments. On a few sites that generate long comment threads like my UK General Election 2010 site (some comment threads have 10+ comments each) it’s set to 10 comment threads per page as it was causing the pages to load slowly with even 25 comment threads per page (even with 10 comment threads it can result in 100+ comments per page).
I get a red warning: Go fix it. You’re not pinging Google Blogsearch when you publish new blog posts, you should add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 to the textarea under the “Update Services” header.
Not absolutely needed, but a nice reminder to ping more than the default ping service (this is SEO fluff, I wouldn’t install a plugin just for this reminder).
Webmaster Tools
There are three boxes for pasting verification codes for the following services.
Google Webmaster Tools:
Yahoo! Site Explorer:
Bing Webmaster Tools:
Again not what I’d consider a killer SEO feature. I suppose useful to those who don’t know how to upload a file Google Webmaster Tools gave them etc… to verify a website. This assumes you use Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools. Personally I haven’t set these up for all my domains (don’t have the time for that level of analysis for 70+ WordPress installations). I didn’t test this SEO feature since was working on a development server on my work PC.
XML Sitemap
Multiple settings related to XML sitemaps.
Although you don’t need an XML sitemap to get a site indexed, many webmasters use them. I never use them on important sites because, if the page isn’t found naturally by Google’s spiders etc… it’s highly unlikely to rank well for anything anyway. On less important domains where you don’t have the time to manually check what’s indexed, use a sitemap it won’t do any harm.
I’m sure many SEO consultants and experts will disagree with me on this point, but I see it similar to the old search engine submission services, yes you can submit your pages to Google etc… one by one, but the search engines don’t rank pages because you submitted them (it’s got no real long term SEO value). Ranking is primarily based on backlinks, if Google etc… can’t find your pages with their spiders (no link juice) they aren’t going to rank well even if the on page SEO is awesome.
I find it more useful to have pages that there’s a problem with spiders finding them naturally NOT to be indexed through an XML sitemap as then I know there’s a problem regarding backlinks or something else is wrong with the page. If I find an important page isn’t indexed I can add more links and check there isn’t another reason for it not being indexed (it’s more work mind you doing it this way which is why I only do this on important sites).
None of the SEO features so far would result in me either using the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin on a live site or recommending it to others.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Titles
Here you have a list of options where you can set what should be shown as the title element and the meta description tag for various types of pages on a WordPress blog. I believe all page types are covered, Home, Categories, Tags, Search, Date and Author Archives, Posts, Pages and even the 404 error page.
There are no built in defaults which means those who don’t understand SEO left to build their title elements and meta description tags from scratch from a list of settings that require copying and pasting to use. Not a good start, there really should be an ideal SEO build for each page type that can be reset upon making a mess of these settings (will add this SEO plugin is in beta stage, so something to add in future releases Mr Yoast 
).
In my themes I use the following settings built into the header.php template file of the themes which I think could be partially mimicked with the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin.
Homepage
Title template: Sitename
Meta description template: Sitename, Sites Tagline
Post
Title template: Post title
Meta description template: Post Excerpt, Sites Tagline. Note: The excerpt can be auto generated or manually created by adding an excerpt to your posts. I use the RSS version of the excerpt since this strips HTML and prevents a few issues with plugins, so my themes meta descriptions are better than what this plugin creates.
Page
Title template: Page title
Meta description template: As above, but for pages rather than posts.
Attachment
Title template: Sitename
Meta description template: Sitename, Sites Tagline
Category
Title template: Category Title
Meta description template: Category Title, Sites Tagline
Post_tag
Title template: Tags Title
Meta description template: Tags Title, Sites Tagline
Author Archives
Title template: Sitename
Meta description template: Sitename, Sites Tagline
Date Archives
Title template: Sitename
Meta description template: Sitename, Sites Tagline
Search pages
Title template: Search Query Title
Meta description template: Search Query Title, Sites Tagline
404 pages
Title template: Sitename
Meta description template: Sitename, Sites Tagline
For search pages and the 404 error page the SEO plugin lacks a meta description, I include one in my themes. I also include an auto generated meta keywords tag (a copy of the title element). Meta keywords adds no SEO value for Google, but customers want them: next update I plan to add the option to remove the meta keywords tag in Talian 05.
If you are not using a theme like Talian 05 that’s got optimized title elements included in the theme, this sort of SEO feature is useful. Though not having a default setting (similar to my settings for Talian 05 above) makes using the SEO plugin to generate optimized titles a chore, I’d hate to be a newbie to SEO and have to create titles with this plugin**
** Out the box Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin title options did not work with my Talian 05 theme or with the default TwentyTen theme since all options are blank and so some title elements are blank by default. This really needs fixing, I would suggest for starters a check box at the top of this options page that needs checking to turn it on allowing webmasters to add the settings before it changes their titles Would also be useful to have this check box for those who have their themes deal with search engine optimized titles etc…
If you are using an SEO theme like Talian 05 that has built in meta tags be aware using this SEO plugin will result in a second meta description tag (you’ll have two). To use this plugin to generate descriptions you’ll need to edit the themes header.php file and remove the default meta description tag.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Indexation
This is the scarey part of this SEO plugin, in the wrong hands this can seriously damage a sites SEO rankings! I have Talian 05 customers who still insist on using the All In One SEO plugin. This is a very popular WordPress SEO plugin which has similar nofollow features (I’ve fully reviewed the All In One SEO plugin recently and it’s no longer using nofollow links) and no matter how many times I tell them they still fill their sites with SEO damaging nofollow links because of these dumbass SEO plugins!
Indexation Rules
Here you will find a lot of tick boxes for setting page types that you don’t want indexing by search engines. Below are the page types that can be blocked:
Search result pages
login and register pages
All admin pages
Subpages of the homepage
Author archives
Date-based archives
Category archives
Tag archives
These are the pages I’d have no problem blocking via a noindex meta robot tag, though it does mean wasting link benefit/PR since the links will still exist, so there’s the argument why bother?
login and register pages
All admin pages
Author archives (depends on the site, one auther blogs you don’t want an author archive)
Date-based archives
You do not generally want to block indexing of:
Search result pages
Subpages of the homepage
Category archives
Tag archives
Many of these pages can gain SERPs in their own right and they aid the indexing of posts/pages within the site (they act like a sitemap that passes link benefit to pages). Not sure why the plugin author would want to block search results, I find other sites (usually not very good search engines) will manage to link to search results (some silly ones) and Google can spider these not very good search engines results pages and index your search pages. There’s no SEO harm in this and there’s the potential to gain SERPs that you lack specifically targeted pages/posts/categories/tags for (worst case scenario is you get some free link benefit).
I recommend to others not to have monthly archives on a WordPress blog, the archive pages add little value to a sites SEO and wastes link benefit on pointless pages. If you do use them it makes more sense to consider them a sitemap because the only (easy) way to block them is to use a combination of a meta robots noindex tag and nofollow links from your sidebar etc… The problem with this is the link benefit (the PR) that would have gone to the monthly archive pages and then flow through to the posts of your site etc… is deleted when you use a nofollow link (Google deletes link benefit on nofollow links!).
It makes no sense at all to nofollow a link that’s to a page you own, unless you have a really good reason for doing so.
In my themes as a partial solution to wasting link benefit on dated archives I’ve set the monthly archive widget to only show on the home page (and it’s home page archives). It’s not a perfect solution, but better than having every page of a site link to 12 links to dated archives that won’t rank for anything.
There is a problem with WordPress login and register pages wasting link benefit, in my Talian 05 theme I’ve solved this issue by changing these links into forms with buttons that are styled to match the theme text link colours (they look and act like text links but neither pass nor waste link benefit). I’ll add it was a pain to code this into the theme, Talian wastes no link juice on the login links (I use the same concept on author links to remove the nofollow attributes).
If I was designing a WordPress theme without using form buttons for login links I’d set the widget with the links to only show on the home page (like the dated archives). Again not a perfect solution, but better than linking every page of a site to this pointless (from an SEO perspective) pages.
Internal Nofollow Settings
Here you have three tick boxes to decide which links are nofollow.
Nofollow login and registration links
Nofollow comments links
Replace the Meta Widget with a nofollowed one
As mentioned above, nofollow links delete link benefit, NO SEO plugin or SEO consultant/expert should add more nofollow links to WordPress (there’s already too many nofollow links in core WordPress). This is not good practice SEO and it worries me that all the major WordPress SEO plugins offer this nofollow feature!
If you are linking to RSS feeds it’s better not to waste the link benefit via a nofollow link, use a normal link and at least the link benefit works for your site.
Hmm, the comment links, link directly to posts comment section. This means if you activate this setting and have 100 posts, you’ve just added at least 100 nofollow links that are deleting your hard earned link benefit (why?).
Login and registration links are a problem, if you aren’t using my Talian 05 theme it’s better to send the link benefit to the login page as it at least links back to your sites home page. If you are the only person who logs into your site, why not remove the login links and just make a bookmark to the admin page so you can login that way. If you must have login links on your blog there’s also the option of surrounding them in some code that means they are only shown on the home page (to login you have to start at the home page). As I mentioned earlier I use this for the monthly archive sidebar widget in the Talian 05 theme (all my WordPress themes) to reduce the wasted link benefit of those who have monthly archives (not ideal, but better than every page linking to them).
Archive Settings
Disable the author archives
Disable the date-based archives
This is an interesting solution to the problem of themes that link to author pages when you have a site with only one author. If you tick the first box it 301 redirects those pages to the home page. Not an ideal solution, but better than nothing and will conserve link benefit that’s wasted on author links. A better solution is remove the links completely from the theme, but that’s going to require template editing on most themes (Talian 05 assumes you are a single author blog, those links are deleted: In hindsight I should add it as an option to have the links for multi author blogs, woops).
301 redirecting the date archives, I suppose useful if you are looking to clean up a site a bit. Remove the monthly archive sidebar widget and 301 redirect already indexed dated archive pages. I’ll add even when you don’t have the monthly archive widget added to the sidebar, you’ll still find the odd monthly archive pages gets indexed (not a major problem though as they aren’t getting link benefit from your site if you aren’t linking to them).
Robots Meta Settings
Add noodp meta robots tag sitewide
Prevents search engines from using the DMOZ description for pages from this site in the search results.
Add noydir meta robots tag sitewide
Prevents search engines from using the Yahoo! directory description for pages from this site in the search results.
Add nosnippet meta robots tag sitewide
Prevents search engines from displaying snippets for your pages.
Add noarchive meta robots tag sitewide
Prevents search engines from caching pages from this site.
The first two are useful meta tags if you are having problems with your site using meta descriptions from DMOZ or Yahoo directory. Not major SEO features, but some do have this problem can also be solved by editing your header.php file and adding the meta tags manually).
The other two settings are about managing what search engines show from your site (not about SEO rankings). If you have a site that’s constantly updating you might not want an old cache showing in Google. Very few people use these meta tags, they are available for solving problems with specific types of sites (generally not issues with blogs).
Clean Up Head Section
Hide RSD Links
Hide WLW Manifest Links
Hide WordPress Generator
Hide Index Relation Links
Hide Previous & Next Post Links
Hide Shortlink for posts
Hide RSS Links
Have to admit some of theses are useful settings that I should consider adding to my Talian 05 theme, although again these are not killer SEO features, removing a few lines of code from the head section of a WordPress page won’t increase rankings (will reduce the size of the page).
Currently I have Talian set to hide the WordPress Generator information because it opens a WordPress site up to potential abuse if you aren’t a regular updater. Basically when a WordPress exploit is found in a particular version of WordPress hackers use the WordPress Generator version number to find blogs that can be exploited! By removing this from the head makes it harder for hackers to find your out of date site (BIG HINT: keep WordPress up to date, NO software is 100% secure). Also from a purely reducing a pages size (faster loading times) there’s an argument for cleaning the head section a bit. Note: these would be considered advanced WordPress settings, generally you wouldn’t want to hide your RSS links on a blog for example, so understand what you are removing before you remove them.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Permalinks
Permalink Settings
Here you’ll find three tick box settings:
Enforce a trailing slash on all category and tag URL’s
Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL.
Redirect ugly URL’s to clean permalinks.
None of them are absolute requirements.
Adding a / to the end of Category URLs, helpful if you want them ending in a /
I don’t see the point in redirecting attachment URLs?
Redirecting ugly URLs, this could be considered an SEO feature, Google is very good at redirecting duplicate pages to the right page and in combination with the canonical information WordPress supplies you shouldn’t need to redirect these ugly links. To give a similar example, if you use comment paging, on posts with a lot of comments you’ll get semi-duplicate content. My Talian themes sales/support page currently has 5 paged comments pages, the third page is
http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html/comment-page-3#comments
I’ve found in the past this can cause problems for the main URL with search engines (Google) ranking one of the comment pages higher than the main page, but because the paged comments have less link juice it results in a lower rank in Google (weird I know)! In this case the main URL is http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html and to avoid SERPs problems it make sense to set the main page as the canonical URL on all the paged comments like so in the head (view source of page 3 of the comments):
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html” />
What these means is Google etc… will redirect any link benefit to the main page, but will still spider the comments pages.
I run a customised version of a plugin called SEO Super Comments (my version only works with Talian 05). This generates posts from large comments. If you check this Google search it lists all the comments indexed from the Talian 05 sales/support page (hundreds of them)
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-theme-talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&ei=TCTfTJ-CGsqzhAeq_P2qDQ&start=0&sa=N
But it doesn’t list the paged comments, so pages 2,3,4 and 5 aren’t indexed, they are spidered though as otherwise the comment pages generated from the SEO Super Comments plugin wouldn’t be indexed.
My point is redirecting ugly URLs doesn’t make a lot of sense when we have canonical URLs set, they’ll be redirected by default anyway.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Internal Links
Breadcrumbs Settings
Here you have a set of options related to adding a breadcrumb trail to your posts. From an SEO perspective there is an argument for adding a breadcrumb trail as it adds more relevant links to your pages. Basically what this does is add a line of links with this sort of format (not actually this format, but if you know what you are doing you can build it this way):
You are here Home Link >> Category Link >> Title of the Post
This doesn’t really add any functionality to the page, but as long as your categories names are optimized (using relevant keywords) this adds some relevant anchor text and the title of the post is repeated without it looking spammy. Using the title of a post multiple times is a way to add relevant keywords to a post as long as you add keywords to your titles, in my themes I use the title of posts multiple times within the templates giving SEO benefit with no extra user input.
Only problem with this setup is the anchor text of the Home link. Generally speaking you’ll use Home as anchor text for a home link on a breadcrumb and Home as anchor text is a no, no (unless you are after Home SERPs)! Note: this breadcrumb Home link anchor text can be set to anything, so you can set a relevant keyword, but it’s going to look a bit weird as a breadcrumb trail if you don’t use Home. I might use this concept in Talian 05, but remove the link aspect of the Home link, so just have text Home or some other solution that doesn’t add anchor text Home (will think about it). It’s a nice idea though.
The plugin author hasn’t added default settings for this feature, so you have to work it out for yourself!
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin RSS
RSS Feeds
noindex the comment RSS feeds
This will prevent the search engines from indexing your comment feeds.
noindex all RSS feeds
This will prevent the search engines from indexing all your feeds. Highly discouraged.
Ping the Search Engines with feed on new post
This will ping search engines that your RSS feed has been updated.
I once had a site where the RSS feed ranked higher for a popular SERP than the page that was originally doing really well in Google. Since the RSS feed lacked AdSense ads and links you can imagine I wasn’t happy about it. I removed the link to the RSS feed from the sidebar and it fixed the problem. It’s only ever happened once, but if you have this problem the first two settings could help.
The third setting is useful, pinging when your RSS feed is updated makes sense.
Content of your RSS Feeds
I like this concept a lot. As it happens a few days ago I started testing another WordPress plugin called @Feed which adds a copyright notice and a unique digital fingerprint to every feed item. I’ll be using it on my sites soon with the format:
Copyright notice, unique digital fingerprint (for tracking sites stealing content) link back to original post, link back to home page of site and links back to related posts (could be set to a high number, I’ll use 3). This means if any one scrapes my RSS feeds they add a set of links (5 links per scraped page) back to my sites
In comparison Yoast RSS Feed content addition feature isn’t as good as @Feeds in that it lacks the ability to add related posts (there’s also other features with @Feed, but @Feed is a dedicated plugin), but I won’t knock the concept of adding this to an SEO plugin (this is a good SEO feature) and also Yoast’s plugin uses the title of the post and title of the blog as anchor text for the links back to your site, the @Feed plugin doesn’t allow for this (you have to set either static anchor text or the URL as anchor text: I’ll probably make an edited version of @Feed for my use that does use the right anchor text when I get the time).
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Edit Files
Robots.txt file
If you have a Robots.txt file you’ll find a box with the contents of your Robots.txt file so you can edit it. Obviously you’ll need your Robots.txt files permissions set to writable for this to work.
.htaccess file
Here you’ll find a box with the contents of your .htaccess file so you can edit it. Obviously you’ll need your .htaccess files permissions set to writable for this to work.
Not a feature I’d use as like an offline backup of my .htaccess file (and wp-config.php file) in case everything goes wrong (in fact I never work online on any files).
I’m sure some will find this feature useful.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Import
Import
Import from HeadSpace2?
Import from All-in-One SEO?
Import from OLD All-in-One SEO?
Delete the old data after import? (recommended)
Delete meta keywords data? (recommended)
Import settings from other plugins
Import from Robots Meta (by Yoast)?
Import from RSS Footer (by Yoast)?
Import from Yoast Breadcrumbs?
I don’t use any of these WordPress plugins, so couldn’t tell you how well the import process works.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Other Features
Above are the majority of the settings available with this SEO plugin, you’ll also find settings added to the edit posts page (when you create or edit a post/page).
Yoast WordPress SEO
SEO Title:
Meta Description:
Focus Keyword:
Meta Robots Index: Index/Noindex
Meta Robots Follow: Follow/Nofollow
Meta Robots Advanced: NOODP etc…
Breadcrumbs title:
Sitemap Priority:
Canonical URL:
301 Redirect:
Most of the above options have been dealt with in the main settings, here you can individually set these settings post by post. Further details:
SEO Title: Here you can set a title element for that post. I name my posts with SEO in mind, if you write your post names with SEO in mind you shouldn’t need this.
Focus Keyword: This looks for the keyword in your post and lists how you used it. I suppose those new to SEO could find this feature useful I work on the principal of adding a keyword as many times as possible as long as it doest read spammy (there is no maximum keyword density, use what reads fine).
Meta Robots Index: Index/Noindex that post
Meta Robots Follow: Follow/Nofollow that post (don’t use nofollow, see earlier).
Meta Robots Advanced: Block NOODP etc… use on meta description for this post.
Breadcrumbs title: If you set breadcrumbs and your post titles are a bit on the long side your breadcrumb will be long, you could shorten it here.
Sitemap Priority: Set an XML priority for this post.
Canonical URL: Not sure why you’d need to ever set a specific canonical URL page by page?
301 Redirect: This could be useful if you ever create a new post on the same/similar subject and no longer want the old post found etc… but don’t want to loose rankings of the old post. I use this concept myself, I’ll manually add a 301 redirect to my .htaccess file and then draft the old post so it’s removed from menus etc… Doing this results in a seamless move to the new page without wasting link benefit etc… When sure I don’t want the old post I delete it (making my database a little cleaner) leaving the 301 redirect in place of course.
There are similar options for other page types like Categories.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review Conclusion
If you managed to read the entire SEO plugin review you’ll see a mixed bag of results. For me a well coded SEO theme like Talian 05 blows a plugin like Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin out the water, so I’d never reccomend it. No SEO plugin manages header use (H1, H2, H3 etc…) within your template files (most templates have a H1 on every page with a link to the sites home page in it, not ideal), no SEO plugin adds significant keywords to posts/pages like I’ve achieved with the Talian theme (the title of posts are used many times at template level). To have a search engine optimized WordPress site you have to use a search engine optimized theme like Talian 05, it CAN NOT be achieved through a plugin alone.
Don’t get me wrong plugins are useful, see the list of WordPress SEO Plugins I use and reccomend (updated November 2010). They can add related post links to posts and pages, add links with keyword rich anchor text automatically and a host of other things (like the @Feed plugin I’ve started testing), but alone a plugin will not result in a search engine optimized WordPress blog.
I do not reccomend using the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Or any of the other WordPress SEO Plugins including the All in One SEO Plugin which I’ve also reviewed.
David Law
Website - WordPress SEO
67 responses to Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Yoast WordPress SEO plugin
Hey Dave,
Your first comment about the title is valid, but that’s why the plugin is still in beta, it doesn’t have any default settings yet and will get these later on.
Paging comments is very relevant especially if you don’t have more than 50 or 100 comments on a page. If it’s enabled, you’ll always be redirected to example.com/single-post/comment-page-1/#commentid after redirecting, and people will start linking to the wrong post. If you use that comments plugin by Vladimir it seems you’re using it’s less relevant (annoying thing I still have to fix, you can’t get rid of those settings advice boxes right now without changing the setting), but further down you yourself even having problems with this!!
I actually with you that a page should be found naturally. You only need XML Sitemaps to increase the speed of indexation, which on a lot of blogs is vital: you want to be ranking for new found issues quickly. It also allows you to check in Google Webmaster Tools whether Google is indexing your full site or if it’s missing pages.
Then for the indexation settings: these indeed are very powerful and can do some harm in the wrong hands. There’s a lot of explanation on that page too which you failed to mention. Also, when you’re blocking indexation, you’re not blocking crawling, nor are you blocking link juice from flowing. As for search result pages: Google has been asking Webmasters to noindex their internal search results for quite a while now. That’s why the feature is there, and yes, I think you should noindex those.
Further down, again, you’re making claims about nofollow that you can’t backup with any research, and saying that “No true SEO expert”, don’t do that. You’re insulting people you shouldn’t insult and you obviously have never really tested this on any real site. You seriously just don’t get what nofollow does (and used to do).
The permalink redirect is less relevant now that we have canonical, but still preserves link equity better when you have a lot of crap added to your URL’s by one or another cause.
For breadcrumbs you’ve obviously only seen half the value. If you say “as long as your categories names are optimized (using relevant keywords)”, you’ve not seen that you can actually set the breadcrumb link to use on the category page (as well as add an SEO title and meta description to categories, tags, or any other custom taxonomies). I’m glad to see you validate the RSS section, it’s taken from another plugin of mine called RSS footer and adds lots of links to your site if you have some dumb scrapers, preventing Google from ranking other scrapers for your posts.
Funny thing is, you check out the single post edit screen and see some stuff there, but you entirely fail to mention the snippet preview, a feature that does give guidance to bloggers and helps them by showing what their post would look like as a result in Google.
In all, you have some fair points, but you’ve also not watched closely enough: a lot of these features are useful in some use cases, because the plugin doesn’t set any defaults yet (and no you shouldn’t use it on production sites yet, that claim is all over it). You have some views of SEO that differ from mine and I think are wrong. I do have research on nofollow but as that’s done on one of my clients sites I’d have to get you to sign an NDA before I could show you that, if you’re interested, drop me an email.
Also, you’ve seen that almost everything this plugin does is an option, that’s for a reason: SEO’s have differing opinions. Instead of forcing my opinion down everyone’s throat, I’m allowing you to use parts of the plugins and ignore other parts. In all, a bit of the feedback above was actually useful, thanks for that, and good luck with your theme.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Yoast WordPress SEO plugin review nofollow and noindex problems
The biggest issue I have with your Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is the nofollow attributes it adds and to a lesser degree noindex**
** Noindex doesn’t delete link benefit, but it does waste it as it’s not helping rank a page that’s indexed (basically the PR/link benefit of a noindex page isn’t used on that page, it’s just passed on through links minus the damping factor). If you noindex your categories for example and they are all decent PR, the PR link benefit flowing through the category pages will go to the post pages etc… (assuming you haven’t nofollowed as well). But the initial link benefit that flows into the category pages isn’t generating SERPs for the category pages.
Imagine how stupid it would be to noindex your home page (the page that tends to gain most link benefit), yes the pages of your site will still get their link benefit, but the home page would gain no SERPs (other than SERPs related to anchor text of incoming links). I don’t see how the category, tags and even the monthly archive (which rarely rank for anything) pages are any different to the home page (any page)?
If you are sending link benefit/PR through a page have it do something, don’t use noindex unless there’s a really good reason for doing so.
My problem with nofollow: You must have come across this post by Matt Cutts http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ the important part regarding nofollow is:
Although I don’t always believe everything Matt Cutts posts, he does work for Google and find it hard to believe on this nofollow point he’d be misleading us (nothing for Google to gain).
It’s clear from this a nofollow link deletes link benefit rather than conserve it as nofollow used to do and so webmasters should not use nofollow unless there’s a damn good reason to do so.
Look at the blinking trouble I’ve had to go to for my Talian theme (which used to use nofollow for links I didn’t want to pass link benefit through), I’ve had to use form buttons styled as text links just so I and my customers can have the login links on their blogs without deleting link benefit! The sad thing is I’m not trying to use this for blackhat SEO reasons, just don’t want to waste link benefit on pages Google (and the vast majority of visitors) have no interest in.
I’ll quickly add I haven’t setup an SEO test on nofollow to test if link benefit is conserved as it used to be, so I’m taking Matt Cutt’s word on this point. I have to say with Google not showing PR on every page like it used to, it’s making some PageRank relevant tests really difficult to setup and maintain.
I can see you’ve put a lot of effort into your SEO plugin, (I like some of the ‘niche’ features, even though I wouldn’t consider them SEO features per se). I appreciate most options in the plugin can be turned off, though you should set it so the blank titles (or default settings if you go that way) are not active until after the user ticks an enable box or something (I just reviewed the All In One SEO Plugin and it’s making changes without being enabled fully!). If you can’t turn something off it’s not an option and currently you can’t turn titles off in your plugin.
I have to tell it how it is with an SEO plugin and I’m afraid the plugin currently does more SEO damage than benefit, especially in the hands of someone who doesn’t understand SEO.
Interestingly the All In One SEO plugin author has removed the nofollow feature of his plugin, at least in the free version (not seen the pro version). When I looked at the All In One SEO plugin about a year ago (I think) it still used nofollow.
Fair enough on your “No true SEO expert” point, (have edited that part of the review) your WP-Hacker post irritated me as I wasn’t insulting anyone, just saying it how it is (IMO of course, if I’m wrong I’ll happily admit it: if you knew me you’d know I love being proved wrong as it means I’ve discovered something I didn’t know or understand).
David Law
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Yoast WordPress SEO plugin canonical URLs
On your paginated comments and canonical URLs point, yes you are correct after a user comments you are redirected to a URL like:
http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/yoast-wordpress-seo-plugin-review.html/comment-page-1#comment-28101 (link to my last comment and what I was redirected to).
But the canonical link is always http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/yoast-wordpress-seo-plugin-review.html for the paginated comment pages (doesn’t matter how you got there), so even if a user decides to link to that particular URL the canonical features of WordPress core results in search engines redirecting the link juice (AKA it doesn’t matter how they link to the page, it counts as a link to the non paginated URL).
That’s how it works for default WordPress with your average setup that doesn’t modify canonical URLs.
Because I use a modified version of the SEO Super Comments plugin my sites have loads of these types of links, see this page for examples http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/yoast-wordpress-seo-plugin-review.html/comment-page-1?cid=28101 that’s generated through the SEO Super Comments plugin.
The above page has 7 links with the format you don’t like, but if you check the pages indexed on this site you’ll find they won’t be indexed thanks to the WordPress default canonical URL settings. Although Talian modifies the canonical URLs it’s only modified (removed) on the new pages created by the SEO Super Comments plugin (had to turn canonical URLs off for those pages as it linked back to the original page the comment is from). On the rest of the site you have the default WordPress canonical URLs.
Look at this site: search from Google
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.google-adsense-templates.co.uk%2Fwordpress-theme-blix-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html&hl=en&num=100&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=off
Note that the main page (the Blix theme sales/support page) is indexed once (as it should be) and the remaining 47 indexed pages are related to the SEO Super Comments plugin**
** I do have a duplicate content issue with that plugin I’ve not fixed yet and it’s because I had to turn canonical URLs off on those page types (these are extra pages generated from the comments, so I’m not concerned about it). I’ve paginate the links from those comment like posts so users can jump directly to the comment and link to them if they choose (the links don’t work correctly otherwise). This has resulted in multiple URLs to the same content (some with yoast-wordpress-seo-plugin-review.html/comment-page-1?cid=28101 and some without yoast-wordpress-seo-plugin-review.html/?cid=28101 the paged format) and they can all be indexed (on my list of things to fix, though not an issue with core WordPress).
I also generate loads of paginated URLs via my sitemap with comments http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/google-adsense-sitemap and it doesn’t cause a problem.
So paginated comments doesn’t cause any indexing problems with the current version of WordPress.
David Law
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Yoast WordPress SEO plugin meta description tags
I’m a little confused about how I get meta descriptions to show in all my page types using this plugin.
Do I need to include a basic empty meta description tag in my header?
Or does the plugin automatically create them? Which it is not doing right now when I customize a pages meta description. Titles are working fine (have the empty wordpress title code in there).
Is there a setting to turn them on or does a field in the setting need to be filled?
Documentation is severely needed for this plugin.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Yoast WordPress SEO plugin no default options
If you see from my plugin review above the current Yoast SEO WordPress plugin (beta release) lacks defaults for title elements and meta tags, you have to build them.
Basically a lot of copying and pasting I’m afraid on the title options page that’s created by the plugin. If you activate the plugin and don’t quickly add them some of your pages may loose titles when reindexed by Google etc…
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
@yoast responded to my question on twitter. I did not have php wp_head(); in my header.php file. Problem solved.
I am looking forward to the plugin coming out of beta.
Don't use Nofollow and Noindex Features of the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin
Glad to hear you solved the problem with the plugin. Will be interesting to see if he takes on board the issues with nofollow and noindex I covered in the SEO plugin review above.
If he doesn’t I advise not using the nofollow or noindex features of the plugin, they are so damaging SEO wise!
If he removed those features wouldn’t be a bad SEO plugin, although there’s no killer SEO features (beyond editing titles that many SEO plugins do now) in the Yoast plugin there are some interesting features (I plan to use some of them in my Talian 05 theme).
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
WordPress SEO Noindex Duplicate Content
I have to disagree with you. It is not damaging to a site’s SEO to keep from indexing Categories and Search Results, etc. Why? Duplicate content. By noindexing these you actually increase your site’s SEO by removing the duplicate content penalties you may incur otherwise. Also, it is highly recommended that you allow either your Tag Pages or your Category Pages to be indexed, but not both. I recommend to my Members to ALLOW the Tag pages because they have the most avenues through your content. Search Pages only get created when a user searches, so why is that even close to being relevant?
There are quite a large number of things wrong with your article and while it seems you understand WordPress fairly well, it seems you do not understand WordPress SEO very well.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
WordPress Duplicate Content and noindex/nofollow
WordPress Duplicate Content and noindex/nofollow.
Yes, there can be a problem with duplicate content on WordPress archive pages if you don’t use an excerpt for archive pages. If you use the TwentyTen theme for example it shows the entire content of posts on archive pages (not a good idea SEO wise).
If you use a WordPress theme with code like mine (Talian 05 for example uses an excerpt) the possible duplicate content issues are significantly reduced, especially if you don’t use the monthly archives and the calendar widget (that widget is really messed up SEO wise).
So you are using a theme like TwentyTen and don’t want to run into duplicate content problems. Best solution I know is use the Post Teaser plugin at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-seo-plugins and change the full post content on archive pages to an excerpt (I’ve had no SEO issues using a 120 word excerpt). It’s having full content archives that’s the problem, relatively short excerpts of a Post on archive pages are highly unlikely to result in duplicate content problems.
If you don’t want to use that WordPress plugin and want monthly archive pages and the calendar widget without deliberately damaging your sites SEO by using a plugin like the Yoast SEO plugin or All In One Plugin, I’m afraid you are going to have to rely on Google to automatically determine on the archive pages that are duplicate (it’s not as big problem as some think**) which is the most important page.
** You tend to only generate duplicate content when you have archive pages with one or two Posts on those archive pages (10 full posts on an archive page isn’t really a duplicate page, it’s a BIG page, but it’s not duplicating ONE page). On the monthly archives this is unlikely IF you are a regular poster, but with the calendar widget it can happen a LOT because of the daily archives it generates. That being said Google is quite good at determining the best page to use for a SERP (999 out 1000 times it will use a blog Post (better optimised title element etc…) rather than an archive page (rubbish title element etc…) with one blog Post on it), Google is not perfect though, which is why I recommend using an excerpt of Posts on archive pages (see Post Teaser plugin) to practically remove the problem.
If you use the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin or the All In One SEO Pack Plugin and noindex your archive pages (as Mike says keeping the Categories and Tags indexable is highly recommended) you are ‘loosing’ link benefit on the noindexed pages.
Follow this SEO logic on noindex:
If you link to a page, link benefit flows to/through that page.
Pages with link benefit flowing to/through them if search engine optimised can gain search engine traffic (through SERPs related to the content).
When a page with link benefit flowing to/through them are noindexed the link benefit still flows through the page, but the link benefit TO the page does no SEO work ON that page, that page can no longer gain SERPs because it’s not indexed (part of the link benefit is wasted).
Please explain the failings in my SEO logic?
If that’s not SEO damage caused by using noindex I better stop offering SEO services.
Noindex is no where near as damaging as nofollow (nofollow deletes the link benefit), but it’s still damaging. Since you can gain SERPs on archive pages (Categories and Tags anyway) noindexing them can potentially result in less traffic from Google etc…
You can argue since the monthly archives and the calendar widget archives are highly unlikely to generate any search engine traffic noindexing them will cause little if any SEO damage (links to them is a waste of link benefit generally anyway, which is why I’d never recommend having them), but noindexing Categories and Tags is a really bad SEO idea as they can gain SERPs in their own right. But then the counter argument is as they (the monthly and calendar archives) are highly unlikely to rank for anything anyway and your blog Posts are going to be better optimised than the monthly archives, the probability of Google etc… ranking a monthly archive page over a blog Post by mistake is a remote possibility, so there’s not a lot to gain using noindex on the vast majority of WordPress blogs.
Note: if Google determines there’s duplicate content on a site (two or more pages on the same site) it combines the link benefit of all the duplicate pages to the page it determines is the best page (almost always the blog Post, not an archive page). Since link benefit going through monthly/calendar archives is a waste of link benefit anyway (other than as a ‘sitemap’ and the Categories and Tags can be used as a sitemap) there’s an argument indexing them will send some of the link benefit going to those archive pages will go to the blog Posts if Google determines an archive page is a duplicate page. For this reason, never use noindex unless there’s a really good reason for it.
The biggest problem I have with these so called WordPress SEO plugins is the plugin authors obviously don’t understand the above (and it’s basic SEO, they should know this) as otherwise there would be BIG RED warnings about noindexing Categories and Tag pages and they’d NEVER use nofollow on anything (at least the All In One SEO plugin author knows this, he/she has removed nofollow features in recent versions).
BTW I’ve figured out a way to block archive pages from being indexed without using noindex/nofollow while not wasting link benefit and allowing link benefit to flow through archive pages (surprised no one has thought of it before to be honest). Thinking about creating a real WordPress SEO plugin using the concept, can do it relatively easily at theme level, but an SEO plugin would be more useful to others.
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
WordPress SEO Techniques That Work
I still disagree with you. Why? Over 123 blogs operating on autopilot and 5 more Authority sites that all list on the first page of Google and over 75 (estimate) of those which rank in the Top 3 listings or at Number #1 for their keywords.
Why?
I tell Google what is important on my sites and what I want it to look at. By using a focused SEO methodology you can channelize the GoogleBot and tell it what you want to be indexed from your sites. If you want, you can have nice Authority Links in your Search listings by using Categories instead of Tags, but for the most part, I only allow my Tag pages to be indexed.
This creates a funnel and minimizes any and all duplicate content. The funnel is created by the Tag Pages created by WordPress and then inner linked though WordPress and the Tags listed at the bottom of every article creating a randomized link structure through your site.
Then you backlink Tag pages based on your site’s Primary and Related Keywords. These keywords are used to focus Google’s attention. We then take these keywords and funnel them to dedicated, keyword optimized pages/posts on the blog. You then use more internal linking to show Google that these are your Authority Pages and you funnel your PR to them, not to mention, keyword focus. This focus is enhanced by external linking and backlinks, focused on the same keywords.
I have tested your very same methodology extensively and my sites have dropped in rank every single time I opened the index doors to my Search, Date, and Category/ Tag archives at the same time. When I have closed the funnel and only allowed either Tag or Category pages to be indexed, the best results have been through Tag pages every single time. I only allow categories when I am building a site for authority and want the Category listings to be shown in the search index.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Good Google SERPs Alone is NOT SEO Proof
That’s not SEO proof. You can get lots of SEO factors wrong and still get great search engine rankings if you are good at generating backlinks and have reasonably well search engine optimized content (with enough backlinks you don’t even need great SEO content) or they are easy SERPs.
Look at the Computers SERP in Google, Dell is number 1, and it’s really badly search engine optimized for the Computers SERP, but it’s PR8 home page is a result of a LOT of backlinks and many will link with anchor text “Dell Computers” and similar. They have so much off site SEO (backlinks) they take a very competitive SERP with practically no on page SEO. Imagine the Computer related long tail SERPs they are missing out on though!
If you got more SEO factors right you’d generate even more SERPs and more money.
Makes no difference to me if you believe me or not, my sites currently pull in over 40,000 unique visitors a day and they are ‘hobby’ sites, they aren’t my main income (my SEO business is my main income).
BTW I wasn’t advocating you have every type of archive possible on a WordPress site, quite the opposite. You only use Tags, I only use Categories for the same reason, (I work on the principle if you can add a Tag to a page, you can create a similar Category instead: I prefer Categories over Tags, but they are pretty much the same thing) though appears you don’t understand why having so many types of archives are so damaging SEO wise:
Date archives are SEO damaging because they add very little to a sites SEO (they help get deep content indexed, but Categories/Tags are better) while taking valuable link benefit away from important pages of a site. Add to this when you add the Archives widget you get 12 links with awful anchor text, anchor text is one of the most important SEO factors on a page, you do not want 12 links on every page of a site with a month as anchor text!!!
Search pages don’t damage a sites SEO, WordPress doesn’t link directly to them. If you happen to get a dumb bot spidering search pages, it’s free low quality links (very little gain, but no SEO damage).
Categories and Tags are useful archives, they act as a sitemap (way for spiders to navigate a site) while adding SEO wise to the site as long as the Categories/Tags are optimised.
If you call your Categories/Tags Cat 1, Cat 2 etc… it’s as bad as having the monthly archives. Name them with relevant keywords like “AdSense WordPress Themes” (one of this sites Categories) and you not only have a set of pages on the site targeting that and related SERPs, the anchor text can help the pages the Category links are on (anchor text is very important).
I generally only use Categories (have the odd Tag here and there) because I try not to waste link benefit on pages that don’t add anything to the site.
WordPress users who create hundreds of Tags and link most of their content with the same Tags are potentially wasting a lot of link benefit on duplicate pages (fortunately Google is good at dealing with duplicate content): as WordPress updates, my themes are compatible with the latest version of WordPress, if I added all the themes to Tags WordPress 3.0, WordPress 3.1, WordPress 3.2 etc… all those Tags would hold the same content (duplicated). If Google fails to combine the results into one pages SERPs, I’ve wasted link benefit for no gain (only one of them is likely to rank well as they have the same content).
If like me you only add Categories/Tags that add something to a site (so not creating them rather than noidexing them like the WordPress SEO plugins offer) I wouldn’t be surprised that your sites would drop in rankings if you tested adding monthly archives and extra Categories/Tags that add nothing SEO wise. Your link benefit is spread thinner (less link benefit to your posts) and your on page SEO is diluted by having wasted anchor text (the dated archives and calendar archives are the worst).
If you use nofollow to ‘hide’ your monthly archives (nofollow ‘hides’ the link to Google) you will almost certainly get better results by removing the archives widget from your site, you’ll not waste link benefit on the dated archive links. Noindex isn’t as bad, but it does waste link benefit.
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
SEO Plan of Action on the combination of all SEO factors
I don’t have time to write a lengthy reply here, but this last post shows that our thought process is largely the same on most factors even though I didn’t talk much about on Page and in content optimization, we have similar mindsets. I agree with you on a lot of what you are saying.
I don’t use Archive widgets. I prefer to enhance my inner linking by providing links to related posts, my categories, and Tags. I don’t link directly to Archives because of the SEO factors.
I focus my SEO Plan of Action on the combination of all factors and I am able to use any theme in doing so.
Good article. You sure have provoked some good responses here, but you are not right about everything you think you are.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
WordPress Autoblog Plugins
I see you do WordPress autoblogs.
After your last comment (the one starting “123 blogs operating on autopilot” I realised we weren’t 100 miles from using similar SEO techniques
I did find a couple of your sites (found your Twitter account) and saw you have a nofollow attribute on your home page link from what I assume is your main site.
Might be an oversight on your part (I still have pages with nofollow dotted around from when Google respected the original reason for nofollow). Using nofollow is a LOT worse than noindex.
I’ve recently started looking into WordPress autoblog plugins, known about auto-blogging for years but most of the software wasn’t very good and autoblogs do tend to be downgraded over time (used to get tens of thousands of visitors a day to Amazon thin affiliate sites which are not unlike autoblogs on autopilot: thin/duplicate content which Google hates).
I’m curious are you offering another WordPress autoblog plugin or only explaining how to use current autoblog plugins effectively?
Did look at one of your autoblog test sites, saw a lot of nofollow links. I guess you don’t agree nofollow deletes link benefit (see the Matt Cutts quote in one of the earlier comments)?
I’ve been playing around with a popular autoblog WordPress plugin (it also uses nofollow affiliate links) and made myself an SEO’d version of the plugin and an edited version of my Talian SEO theme for that autoblog plugin that hides the affiliate links rather than nofollow’s them (all the autoblog plugins I’ve looked at use nofollow on affiliate links).
Been a few years since I put effort into trying to make money from thin content sites, so running new tests on both autoblogs and thin affiliate sites, the latter are slightly older tests (~3 months old) and aren’t doing too bad considering they are thin content and took an hour or two to create each: with 24 thin affiliate sites, made over $150 from AdSense last week and a little less from affiliate sales (roughly $10 per site per week in total). I expect they’ll all be seriously downgraded long term, but for something that takes an hour or two to create it’s easy money ($500 per site per year IF they last a year before the inevitable Google downgrade).
My test autoblogs aren’t very old and taking my time adding the content (well below 10 posts per site per day) so don’t expect results for a few more months at least.
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Affiliate links and the nofollow attribute to protect link benefit
The main reason for using the nofollow attribute on the sites is to purposely not give credit to the affiliate links there. Being that Google only recognizes the first 100 links on a page, I like to make sure it is only indexing and following the links I want it to. Therefore Google will not then look at my sites as thin affiliate sites.
My course has some software but not a pure auto blogging plugin. I recommend several very good tools to my members and show them how to use them in my course, but I focus on creating SEO Friendly, value added sites and not SPAM Blogs or junk “quickie” sites. These old techniques do not work and only sites that add value to users and the web work as auto blogs. So I tend to describe my Course and a way to build value added blogs that run on auto as opposed to pure auto blogs. Unique content is required on these sites as well.
I would be interested to hear how you cloak your links from Google without using the nofollow in them. Email me if you do not want to post it here.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Google 100 Links Per Page SEO Rule
Google’s never limited the number of links it will follow from a page to 100.
There used to be a 100KB indexing limit, where Google would only index the first 100KB (code wise) of a page, but it dropped that limitation years ago.
Google and many SEO’s advise trying to limit the number of links from a page to under 100, but it’s an SEO guideline (an arbitrary one at that), not a limit per se (Googlebot will spider more than 100 links from a page: have tested this).
When the Googlebot hits a page it randomly follows links from the page, if you have 100 links there’s a 1 in 100 chance of any one link being followed. Googlebot doesn’t limit itself to following only one link per visit, but for the sake of ease of understanding if it did, the Googlebot would find it extremely difficult to follow all 100 links from a page over a reasonable period of time.
The SEO argument is by limiting the number of links from a page to below 100 the probability of links not being followed and their respective pages spidered by Googlebot is significantly reduced.
I’ve never deliberately limited the number of links from a page to below 100, add as many links as are needed, and have tested a links page with over 1,000 links where I added pages not linked from anywhere else and they were eventually spidered from that page (took a while mind you).
Basically if you have sites with a lot of Categories (Tags in your case
) for example because many of your pages have those links, the probability of some being missed is very low.
There is also the argument of how many links a particular page can support and what you are trying to achieve SEO wise.
If you have a page (Page A) with one backlink to it from a page (Page B) without any good backlinks to it, Page A would not be a good choice for a links page with 200+ links to pages you wanted indexing fast. Page A won’t be visited very often and some of the 200 links might not be spidered from that page for months/years.
So on a site with hardly any backlinks it’s going to struggle with pages with a lot of links, but a site with a lot of backlinks can handle pages with a lot of links from the pages.
With regards hiding affiliate links, I’ll drop you an email with a link to one of my test sites using WPRobot, every nofollow link is hidden via a combination of hacking the WPRobot module files and an edited version of my Talian theme. Been meaning to try to find the time to achieve similar without having to resort to hacking the modules (make it a theme feature, have a lot of customers who autoblog), but I’ve gone as far as replacing the links the eBay module creates (that are served by eBay) so there are NO nofollow links and no links a search engine spider can follow from the thin content. The added benefit of this is it hides the thin affiliate footprint, search engine bots don’t see links to Amazon etc…
Since Google deletes the link benefit that would have gone through a nofollow link I’d never use them on an internal link (linking to Categories for example). You could argue as you don’t really want to send an affiliate link, link benefit (helps them rank better than you) even though nofollow deletes link benefit, as you don’t want to send it to an affiliate that can compete with you, delete it (that’s why I hide the affiliate links rather than nofollow or dofollow them).
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
I guess its true, you learn something new every day. But even though my 100 Link limitation could be seen as a self imposed one, it would appear that this is the way to go on pages that are heavily laden with non-relevant links.
After researching this quite a bit, I still find that most “SEO’s” recommend using the nofollow attribute to disqualify links on a page. I can see that you could also use an index/ nofollow attribute in the meta tags of the page as well if you wanted to blanket this, but I like having the ability to decide myself. I use the attribute sometimes, but not all the time with affiliate links as I have actually had Cloaked Affiliate links indexed by Google and received quite a bit of traffic from them. This is the excpetion rather than the norm, but it happens from time to time.
I haven’t tried your SEO theme, but I might have to try it on a few auto blogs and see if the testing shows exceptions to my current sites and the results I achieve with them.
Back to the original point of this Post though: I have tested this SEO Plugin quite a bit and I have to say I have not seen Google react quite as fast to my blog post and title changes as quickly as they have since I installed this plugin. I don’t know if it is Google’s latest algorithm changes or the plugin. Although I recently realized that I had a blog that wasn’t showing Previews in Google. I went into the plugin in the Indexation Settings and in the Robots Meta Section, I unchecked the “nosnippet” box and when I checked my site in Google an hour later, Previews were working. Not bad for what seamed like a very small change.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
SEO Experts/SEO Consultants and nofollow links
Many SEO Experts/SEO Consultants do still recommend using nofollow, but they are wrong. People get stuck in their ways and when something used to work they want it to always work, the really good SEO experts keep track of these sorts of things and change their SEO techniques over time to best practices and current best SEO practice is not using nofollow.
Also make sure what you are reading on nofollow is up to date, I’m sure I’ll have missed something in one or more of my older SEO articles recommending the use of nofollow (it used to work and was perfect for managing link benefit), on this site for example there’s going to be comments from me praising nofollow from a couple of years back. You might be reading articles from SEO’s who have since changed their advice, but not all their sources of information.
If you read around this you’ll know Google made the nofollow change without informing the webmaster community. Some SEO experts who do their own SEO tests suspected nofollow was deleting link benefit (have to admit I missed it, I trusted Google on nofollow as it was such a good idea) and it wasn’t until Matt Cutt’s confirmed the change in 2009 that I acted on it (so the information is only a year or so old). I’ll add it was a Talian theme customer that pointed me to the Matt Cutt’s article (I don’t read his site regularly) that confirmed the nofollow change, until then I thought the SEO experts that had suspicions nofollow had changed was wrong (Google: do no evil and all that!).
Then there’s the so called SEO Experts who test nothing themselves and just regurgitate what they read on a few forums which are almost all filled with misinformation (nofollow case in point)!
I don’t recommend using the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin, it’s so easy to make a mistake as it’s got the nofollow/noindex options without describing the SEO damage they do (the plugin author must believe using nofollow/noindex is good SEO advice and doesn’t delete/waste link benefit!).
The only must have SEO features of the Yoast SEO plugin (there are other interesting plugin features, but not must have SEO features per se) is the ability to manipulate a pages title element (if you use Talian or any of my themes this is automated: you get the perfect SEO title elements, using an SEO plugin as well is overkill).
If I wasn’t using Talian I wouldn’t use this SEO plugin just for the ability to manipulate title elements (it lacked SEO defaults when I tested it). The All In One SEO Pack plugin does the same thing and doesn’t include nofollow settings (still includes noindex, but that’s minor SEO damage compared to nofollow).
BTW it won’t be the Yoast plugin that caused a delay in Google picking up title element changes, you were ‘unlucky’ the Googlebot didn’t hit your site quickly that day/week. On my popular sites I’ve posted a new article, loaded it in FireFox, copied the title of the post and searched in Google and it’s already indexed: years ago we’d be bragging our pages were indexed in under 24 hours now it can be minutes
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Ok, after looking through around 100 articles last night, you seem to be on top of your game here and I read the same Matt Cutts article from 2009 as well, not to mention about 30 more recent ones as well.
In your opinion then, what is the best exact setup for a WordPress blog? I also have an external Robots.txt file that I give to my members as well, using the same methodology, allowing Tags, but nothing else, and then also ensuring that the backend of WordPress is Disallow’d as well.
I will send you a copy of my current configuration and you can let me know what you think. I have ot say that this has been one of the best SEO discussions I have had in years as most SEO’s as you have already said agree with me on how to manage SEO on blogs, but as you correctly pointed out, things are changing and you have to keep ahead of the game or get left behind.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Best WordPress SEO Setup
The SEO WordPress setup I use and recommend is as follows.
Don’t use any themes or plugins that add more nofollow links to WordPress (WordPress isn’t perfect SEO wise, it adds nofollow links to comments, don’t add more).
Don’t noindex pages unless there’s a really good reason for it. Never noindex sets of pages in bulk, so don’t noindex sets of archives, if you don’t want them indexing don’t add the widget and don’t use that type of archive.
Don’t use monthly archives (the Calendar widget is even worse), they add nothing to a site SEO wise (I don’t think they add anything user wise either) and as long as you have Categories and/or Tags search engines and users can find all your posts easily.
Although the perfect permalinks setup from an SEO perspective is %postname% be aware IF your WordPress blog has a lot of static Pages this setup can have an impact on a sites performance (takes longer for WordPress to load a page). If concerned that you will have a lot of static Pages use something like %post_id%-%postname% (not ideal SEO wise). I’ve used the best SEO setup for years and not noticed a performance issue, but I don’t have any sites with a lot of Posts AND a lot of static Pages: I’m sure using a plugin like WP Super Cache will more than offset any performance issues associated with using the perfect SEO permalinks.
Generally speaking don’t add too many Tags or Categories. Try to only add Categories/Tags that can potentially gain your site more traffic (more SERPs) or adds user value (makes it easier for your visitors to find something easily that’s important).
You can find WordPress sites with each post with dozens of Tags along the lines of “SEO, WordPress, Themes, AdSense, Templates, Plugins etc…” that might seem a good idea at the time, but unless that domain has a lot of link benefit (high PR) the chances of an archive page (Tag archive) with a one word title element (like AdSense or WordPress) is highly unlikely to rank well for the main SERP (single word SERPs tend to be VERY hard).
I tend to think medium difficulty SERPs for Categories (or Tags) along the lines of two and three word SERPs. Each Category/Tag you create is going to take link benefit away from the rest of the site.
An extreme example would be if you have a blog with 10 posts and a couple of Categories you might have 20 links on an average page (each link gains roughly 1/20th (relatively speaking) of the link benefit flowing through the site).
Add 50 Tags and now your important Posts might only gain 1/70th (relatively speaking) of the link benefit flowing through the site because you are wasting it on Tag archive pages that are highly unlikely to rank for anything and probably don’t add to the visitor experience!
In a perfect world every page of a site would have a user function and generate SERPs in their own right. If you can’t see that user function/SEO value don’t add that page.
I use the plugins on my SEO plugins page http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-seo-plugins to add to add SEO features.
The above holds true whether you use my Talian 05 SEO theme or any WordPress theme. Most WordPress themes aren’t great SEO wise, they make basic SEO mistakes like nofollowing and using headers on menus, but WordPress is very good SEO wise with minor settings changes (like SEO permalinks) and in WordPress 3.1 there’s only the nofollow links from comment author links to worry about (I finally got a WordPress developer to remove the nofollow attribute from the comment Reply links).
So even with a randomly selected WordPress theme from the WordPress theme repository along with minor WordPress settings changes you’ve got a site that SEO wise is better than the VAST majority of non-WordPress sites online today.
I might complain about WordPress not being perfect SEO wise (I’m an SEO perfectionist
), but compared to other ways to generate a website (Dreamweaver, Frontpage etc…) there’s no comparison.
WordPress is awesome, which is why it’s the only CMS/blog platform I use.
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
As we talked about in our Private email exchange, I found that my robots.txt file is highly accurate minus 2 references to trackbacks that Google will not recognize. I am constantly tuning and I am finding that minus a few quirks in the WordPress SEO plugin here that even my members are reporting faster indexing and changes with this plugin compared to Platinum SEO, All in One SEO, and SEO Ultimate. That cannot be a coincidence. My own tests have shown the same and even one of my test blogs that I was not intending to show to the world yet ended up indexed within an hour of the first post with every base page and the single post all indexed and on the first page already (very weak niche). The new update at version 1.8 and Version 1.9 of this plugin will take care of 99% of the issues that have been identified as I am curiously watching Joost’s updates on WordPress.org.
I am impressed and will continue to use the plugin since I use numerous themes. One SEO theme, while very solid in SEO is a great thing, users look for more on the sites they visit. Profitability comes from a mix of great SEO and a Value added site created with the user in mind and not primarily SEO.
You can have a perfect site SEO wise, but if a visitor thinks it looks like a junk or plain looking site, a lot of the time they will click away. Aesthetics are as important as SEO in determining how visitors react when they get to your sites. To look past this from a Marketing standpoint is as wrong as it gets. A solid SEO base with a user friendly site is the combination that breeds success rather than just enables it.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and Google spidering speed
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin won’t speed up spidering of a site per se.
If you use the Yoast SEO plugin and use nofollow on most of your archive links (Categories, Monthly and Tags) there’s a lot less links to follow, (same as if you didn’t have all the archive types) so the pages that are left might be found slightly quicker (won’t increase the number of Googlebot visits though).
Less pages on a site (nofollow effectively hides pages) faster all the pages that can be spidered will be spidered.
This is not a reason to use an SEO plugin as nofollow is SEO damaging. What you might gain in slightly faster indexing (and it will be a minimal impact) you’ll loose several times over in decreased rankings because you are wasting so much link benefit.
Are you seriously going to use nofollow even though you’ve discovered what I wrote about nofollow and the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is true?
Regarding your robots.txt file there was potential issues, blocking Googlebot from all php, xhtml pages etc… and blocking the spidering of /wp-content/ and other pages like about/contact COULD cause problems with SOME setups (depends on what else is running on the site). If all that’s on the site is WordPress, probably OK.
I wouldn’t give that robots.txt file to a newbie looking for a robots.txt file as they could block parts of their site that are not WordPress files.
Not sure what you are getting at regarding SEO themes? The perfect setup would be 100% SEO’d theme AND a site built for users. My sites that run Talian 05 currently generate over 40,000 unique visitors a day. They are almost perfect SEO wise, user wise some are better than others (works in progress).
I’d rather start from a perspective of almost perfect SEO and get a lot of traffic and work on the user experience than have an awesome looking site that is rubbish SEO wise and gets no traffic.
I’ll add the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin does not improve a users experience as the vast majority of changes are behind the scenes and they are supposed to result in an SEO’d WordPress installation, but fails in key areas (deleting and wasting link benefit).
If the author removed the nofollow features and gave a warning on the noindex feature it wouldn’t be a bad SEO plugin, there’s some interesting features.
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
I understand you are trying to sell your theme here and I appreciate that, but I have been doing this a long time. Not just a few weeks, months, or even a few years. I have been doing this for over 10 years. Auto Blogging heavily since Blog and Ping with Google Adsense worked.
I used themes that look just like the Talian theme you have here. The big difference is I used these type of themes because they produced a lot of Adsense clicks.
Why?
Because they are plain looking and most people clicked on the Adsense Ads to find a better site. This was regardless of content and SEO. I built my sites (and still do) to have the best SEO and Content possible, but the fact remains that while I could always do very well with Adsense with these types of Themes, they never did well with other types of Affiliate Product promotions. The top of the page is what people first look at on a site and while the SEO may bring you in tons of visitors, it is not the number of visitors I am concerned with. It is the number of targeted buyers who like what they see, trust my content, and then click and buy what I want them to buy. SEO won’t pay the bills by itself.
And Yes, I like the SEO system that focuses the GoogleBot and other Search Engines to quickly index the Content that I WANT to be indexed. I want to define the Posts and Pages on my site that I WANT Google to spider and index because by doing this, I target my visitors and I target my affiliate and advertising campaigns.
You want to know the most important part of this equation? This works and IS WORKING right NOW. I fully understand your methodology on SEO, but you have to understand mine and why I do what I am doing. I am not trying to sell a theme here. I am creating keyword focused sites where Google knows where to go because I am telling it where to go and where I want it to go is to the Posts and Pages on my WordPress Blogs that are built to make money. All the other Posts and Pages I create are nothing but spider food that help direct the flow of Google and the visitors that come from it to exactly where I want them to and they buy. If they didn’t, I would be out of a job and my Members wouldn’t be very happy with me right now.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
So how old is this article?
Not a date on the page. Not even on the comments.
So how old is this information? A month? A year? Older?
Is it even valid any more?
(This comment added 4th of may, 2011).
Stallion SEO Theme Feature Turn Dates Off
The WordPress theme I’m using, Stallion 6, has an option to turn a WordPress blog into a CMS by hiding post dates and/or comment dates.
The Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review is ~6 months old and was valid when I last checked out the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin about 3 months ago.
The Yoast SEO Plugin author, Joost de Valk, appears to be in denial about the SEO problems with his plugin, (believes nofollow does no SEO damage despite the clear evidence!!!) so I don’t see him changing the plugin anytime soon.
Not a recommended WordPress SEO Plugin if you care about your sites SERPs.
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
So What SEO Plugin is the Alternative?
I have been using the WordPress SEO plugin for some time now and I highly recommend it to my Members. The single nofollow attribute you are worried about is a micro point in a huge and more important SEO discussion.
I know we had this discussion before, but over 80 Blogs with top 5 rankings, yes, top 5 (with a lot of #1′s) say that a plugin alone is not even close to being the determining factor in your site’s SEO, but even more importantly, in how Google will actually rank your site.
I use this plugin on all those sites and my site’s that don’t have it (about 50+ using Platinum SEO Pack because I was too lazy to change it out) don’t do as well. This is a statistical fact, not something I am making up.
The overall point being, that more site’s than none do not have every single SEO factor perfect on their Blogs and they still rank #1 for their chosen keywords and their are blogs which have everything 100% right and they do not.
Success does not lie on onsite and onpage SEO alone and some of these small form factors have a relevance to your overall success of like 2-5%. So I think I will be sticking with the WordPress SEO Plugin because results speak louder to me than any tit for tat SEO discussion.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Best WordPress SEO Plugins for Autoblogs
I’ve noticed an assumption in a lot of people when discussing WordPress SEO that because a plugin is called an SEO Plugin it must be good SEO wise or at least must do something SEO wise.
You just compared two pretty much useless (SEO wise) WordPress plugins the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and the Platinum SEO Pack plugin and concluded the Yoast SEO plugin is better SEO wise because the sites running it are performing better. Most likely a coincidence or if you are anything like me you update your most important sites first and you add more links and put more effort into the content of those sites: if that’s the case they should rank better, right?
As you said there’s a lot more to SEO than onpage SEO factors, backlinks are far more important than anything you can do onsite. You can build the absolute perfect SEO site, but if it lacks aged backlinks that pass a reasonable amount of link juice you might as well not bother, without those aged links a sites going to struggle to do really well. That being said, if you are working hard on the backlinks you don’t want to waste all that effort and not have content that Google can rank well, which is why it’s generally not a good idea to link to a blank page and hope it ranks for something
As you are an autoblogger I don’t see anything useful in the two WordPress SEO plugins you’ve compared beyond the ability to change how a theme presents the title element and that can be achieved with far fewer server resources (server resources are damn important to autobloggers) just by making a simple change to the themes code.
Autobloggers don’t write custom title elements, they don’t write custom meta descriptions for the posts, so what exactly do these plugins do SEO wise that’s important and NOT SEO damaging (nofollow and noindex are SEO damaging)?
Don’t get me wrong, there’s some useful features in the Yoast plugin, but most aren’t SEO features (they won’t increase search engine rankings). I use all sorts of plugins from poll plugins to Tweet plugins, but they have little to no SEO value. Recently released the Stallion WordPress SEO Theme which incorporates some features I liked in the Yoast SEO Plugin, but they aren’t SEO features per se, they are features useful to WordPress users (especially autobloggers, got thousands of autobloggers using Talian/Stallion so designed Stallion with them in mind). Working on an update to Stallion 6 that will automatically cloak WPRobot 3 Autoblog Plugin affiliate links (that WPRobot 3 affiliate link is cloaked), Amazon links etc… (see Stallion Theme Cloak Affiliate Links Tutorial for details). Already have it working in the current Stallion 6.0.1 release for the Massive Passive Profits Autoblog Plugin where it hides all affiliate links saving loads of link benefit that was deleted by nofollow links (WPRobot 3 also uses a lot of nofollow links).
Problem with asking what’s the best WordPress SEO Plugins is it’s like asking what’s the best engine oil when discussing car performance. Like engine oil, plugins are important to WordPress SEO, but like with oil if that’s all you use to increase performance/SEO rankings, you are missing out on a lot of possible improvements.
WordPress is the best CMS out the box SEO wise I’ve tried so even running with vanilla WordPress and the TwentyTen theme and no plugins etc… you are already ahead of the game compared to the vast majority of sites on the Internet. WordPress is not perfect, the two biggest SEO issues currently with default WordPress are nofollow links (this is by far the biggest SEO issue with WordPress, can waste half your SEO efforts) and archive pages showing full posts (potential duplicate content issues).
I don’t know of any WordPress plugins that can solve the nofollow issues, there’s two themes that fix the nofollow issues, Talian and Stallion with Stallion solving more nofollow issues (removes all nofollow links from WordPress).
The full posts on archive pages can be easily solved at theme level (using excerpt code) or with the Post Teaser Plugin from the WordPress SEO Plugins page on this site.
Most other WordPress SEO issues are ‘created’ at theme theme level and by using plugins that cause SEO damage (lots of social network plugins for example are awful SEO wise). For example most WordPress themes have a title element with format “Name of Site : Post Name” which isn’t ideal (ideal is “Post Name”), most put the name of the site in the header area with a H1 header which again isn’t ideal, the H1 header should be used for the name of the post and a H1 header should only be used on the home page for the name of the site. All solvable at theme level, but if you are using a theme that uses a H1 header for the name of the site you are stuck with it, no plugin is going to remove that H1 header.
From WordPress SEO Plugins these are the WordPress plugins I use on autoblogs.
Post Teaser WordPress SEO Plugin : significantly reduces the possibility of duplicate content issues on archive pages.
Contextual Related Posts SEO Version : if you find it’s generating a lot of database queries (can on large sites) use the Related Posts WordPress SEO Plugin instead.
©Feed Plugin : SEO Version : good if your auto blogged content is scrapped, gains free links.
WP-PageNavi WordPress Plugin : shows more archive links on the home page, helps with indexing large autoblogs (not essential though).
I also use an automatic re-poster plugin, but not released my version yet. When an autoblog has a fair amount of content I turn off adding new auto content and turn on the re-poster plugin. This randomly grabs a post and gives it the current date. This way a site with say 2,000 posts keeps refreshing the the archive pages (home page, categories, tags) without having to keep the autoblog plugin running. Means you can have more autoblogs on the same server without it eating into server resources. I’ve found there’s more value in having say five 2,000 page autoblogs than one 10,000 page autoblog as Google no longer indexes large sites unless they have a LOT of backlinks.
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
You Don't Know 2011 Auto Blogging Very Well
Nice Advertisement, but I have a very all inclusive list of Plugins for my Members as well. Some things, similar, but a lot that are different as I focus more on a dedicated Inner Linking strategy that focuses in on the Posts and Pages that do the best on the site. We tell Google what pages are the most important and we focus our Keyword (Inner and External) Linking strategies to create a keyword focused environment which elevates the content we want to focus on higher in the SERPs. The great thing is, it works.
Most of the Plugins here are gimmicks in my opinion and do nothing to really focus on SEO. Ok, so I use the SEO Smart Links and Related Posts plugins too, but there is a lot more to it than that.
I know you are focused on Advertising your theme here, but perfect theme coding is nice for SEO, but in the big scheme of things it results in a minute change in Google grade. With most SEO scoring systems, it won’t make a bit of difference.
There is more to Auto Blogging than throwing up a thousand pages and hoping one sticks. That is very 2009/ Early 2010. A lot has changed and you need to work smarter now.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Best WordPress SEO Plugins
An advertisement LOL, last time I checked when someone asks a question like “So What SEO Plugin is the Alternative?” and the response is a list of free WordPress plugins with SEO aspects to them that the author of the answer did not create (none of those plugins are mine, I don’t make WordPress plugins) it’s generally not considered an ad. What do I gain recommending these WordPress plugins?
Also if all I cared about was advertising a WordPress SEO theme, don’t you think it would be easier to delete your comments? It’s my site after all, only takes a second to delete a comment.
Anyway, what you describe above is very basic SEO 101. Those are not new SEO techniques, linking relevant pages together with relevant keyword focused anchor text has been the must do basic SEO for almost as long as I’ve been making a good living as an SEO consultant (~10 years).
How do you stop Google from penalising your autoblogs long term? With thin affiliate sites it’s not IF a site will be penalised, it’s WHEN. If you hide some of the obvious thin content footprints (like linking to affiliate links in a way Google can easily track) you might be lucky and have an autoblog run on autopilot for a few years before it’s inevitable demise in Google.
Most of the WordPress plugins at WordPress SEO Plugins are there for SEO reasons.
Post Teaser WordPress SEO Plugin : duplicate content reduction (SEO reason).
Contextual Related Posts SEO Version and Related Posts WordPress SEO Plugin : link relevant post together with relevant anchor text (SEO reason).
Most Popular Posts WordPress Plugin : Puts your most commented posts on a widget, adds more links to your popular posts assuming the most commented posts are the popular ones (SEO reason).
©Feed Plugin SEO Version : Gains automated backlinks (SEO reason).
Remove Links in Comments WordPress SEO Plugin : Stops links in comments from becoming clickable which prevents a nofollow link (SEO reason).
SEO Smart Links WordPress Plugin : Adds keyword rich links to the pages you want links to (SEO reason).
WordPress SEO Super Comments Plugin for Talian 05 : There’s a version of this plugin that works with many themes, but last time I checked it no longer works because WordPress built in canonical URLs break the plugin (the comment pages are created, but they have canonical links back to the original post so Google doesn’t index them). You have to turn canonical URLs off for the single post template used by the plugin. This plugin turns comments into posts, this is a great SEO plugin and one that works well with the WPRobot 3 Autoblog Plugin which can add hundreds of comments to an autoblog. I use the SEO Super Comments Plugin in combination with the Hikari Comment title plugin which when used correctly can turn comments into traffic generating pages in their own right.
Where are the gimmicks with the WordPress plugins I recommend?
BTW how much traffic do your sites generate a day? I’m not a big auto-blogger (have a dozen autoblog test sites) and my sites currently gain around 60,000 unique visitors a day the vast majority from Google organic search (I don’t pay a penny for traffic).
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Unified SEO theme vs. Plugins here and there
@Mike,
I am not Dave. I try to be as objective as possible. I have used SEO plugins and I have used Dave’s themes.
There is no reason for me to report anything than what I have experienced, because it would not be in my best interest to use something on a website that does not maximizes profit for me.
I have chosen to use the SEO theme, rather than plugins. Why?
SEO themes rather than SEO plugins -- The SEO themes in my experience work better on several levels, too many to detail. I have tried using most of the SEO plugins for years. I have a number of websites. I would not recommend using SEO plugins now, when you have a theme that does it better. People can make their own choices but I have a business and I am not going to risk it with a plugin.
Unified SEO vision -- I would rather have a unified theme and SEO strategy than work with plugins and themes from various designers and hope there are no conflicts. With these themes they are tried and tested. Dave’s themes evolve with the time with each new update. I can focus on my core business and be confident that these themes are up to date with a current and unified understanding of SEO theory.
SEO theory is evolving. For example, nobody has a full grasp on Google Panda and can tame it, and to say so is the pretense of knowledge. But as theories develop and with time, I am pretty sure the ideas in the Dave’s SEO themes will change in a unified way to respond.
3) Trust -- I trust the guy because he is worthy of it. Over the years I have seen Dave admit mistakes as well as successes. His writing is very detailed, specific and intelligent. He writes on a personal level as well, but you can see is objectivity.
He in one sense, is like the old man who used to fix my watch. He would look at it and tell me in a no-nonsense way what was wrong with my watch and fix it. It was all clear. I trust people like that.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
No Bashing
I am not trying to bash, I am only making a point. Your Theme is very SEO Friendly I am sure, but I wouldn’t use it because I don’t personally like how generic it looks. I think it looks like an Auto Blogging theme. My personal opinion. No bashing.
What I like to use are themes which make my Auto Blogs look like and operated like any other blog would. With Google in 2011, you have to be more particular about how you do things.
That is why I call plugins like SEO Super Comments “gimmick” plugins. They use gimmicky tactics to improve SEO. The reality is, the single best way to do SEO is through a dedicated Keyword Management plan of action. How you use your Primary and Related Keywords on your Blogs or Auto Blogs will determine your success more than a single theme or slice of code will. My plugin list is very different from yours and I use some of the most Advanced Auto Blogging plugins available, but I do not advertise this list publicly beyond my Membership.
I have around 5500+ Active Members in my Auto Blog Blueprint Membership right now and more are being added every day. It is over 18 months old and I am now on Version 3.0 because I have adjusted and modified my approach based on a huge amount of active testing and results based information.
Yes, you need to have a relatively clean coded theme in order to maintain site speed and allow the GoogleBot to flow through your site, but you can enhance this by dictating flow in your WordPress SEO plugin and your Robots.txt file. You try to obtain a quality level of proper Keyword Density in your Targeted Money Pages/ Posts and then you use your Catgories and Tags to establish a baseline inner linking strategy, SEO Smart Links to target those Money Pages with the Keyword links on your site (from your automated content), and then you do the same thing with your External Linking as well.
All of this will mean a lot more to your overall Ranking than anything. Keyword Management and Focus tells Google which pages on your site are the most important, but more importantly, it tells Google what Keywords your Important and Targeted Money Pages should Rank for. This is the same for any Blog, but it works great for Auto Blogs.
I don’t pay for Traffic to Auto Blogs either and never would. it defeats the purpose. I hold tons of number #1 postiions and have almost 140 current Auto Blogs. On a daily basis, I can receive anywhere from 100 Visitors to some of my Blogs to just over 2000 on some others.
To sit here and say, “I get over 60,000 Visitors per day” to my blogs is a huge misnomer because this is and always will be based on the specific keywords a blog is optimized for and the amount of visitors those keywords get to Google on a Daily basis, the popularity of the Niche, and the placement in the SERPs, right?
For some keywords Ranked at #1 in some niches, I get only 40-60 clicks per day, but because of the nature of the Niche, most of these Visitors are actively looking to Buy and it is one of my most profitable blogs.
So you can have 1 Million Visitors each day, but if the niche isn’t right and the site isn’t right, it won’t matter anyways. I don’t want to have perfect SEO and then have everyone come to my Blog and immediately “Bounce” away.
I know you have a great deal of knowledge here and I don’t want to take anything away from that, but having a lot of SEO knowledge doesn’t always translate to Marketing knowledge. I made over $46,000 with my almost 140ish Blogs in March and I think I am really close to that for April as well (still waiting on refunds, etc).
This is why we have 2 very different mindsets on how to go about this.
Mike
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin
Since you say the SEO Super Comments plugin is a “gimmick” plugin, does this mean you don’t recommend your Auto Blog Blueprint Members use it?
I’ve been using an edited version of the SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin for over a year now and it’s generating search engine traffic.
My version (see Stallion SEO Super Comments Plugin Feature) is a lot better than the original SEO Super Comments plugin, amongst other new SEO features you can set the title element of the comment pages.
Onpage SEO wise there’s nothing more important than the title element (title tag) and the original SEO Super Comments plugin used the title of the original post: that’s not ideal because you generally don’t want dozens of pages with the same title element.
My Stallion version of the SEO Super Comments plugin uses the Comment Titles that you see on this page (from the Hikari Comment Title Plugin : also built into Stallion). Your commenter’s can set a Comment Title which will be used as the title element on the comment posts.
If a commenter doesn’t add a decent comment title the site owner can add one later without editing the body of the comment. I’m taking lots of long tail SERPs that I’ve not covered in main posts using this technique. For example there’s a good chance this comment will gain SERPs related to “SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin” which is the comment title I’ve set.
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Talian 5 and Stallion 6 are not Autoblog WordPress Themes per se
None of the WordPress theme designs I’ve converted** to SEO themes are designed for auto blogging per se (is there really such a thing as an auto blog theme?), I don’t do auto blogging to make money which is why I could use an SEO version of the WPRobot 3 autoblog plugin (I made an SEO version of WPRobot 3 which among other things removes all nofollow links, cloaks affiliate links) to create preset-up autoblogs in under 5 minutes (have a script that creates autoblogs that are preset-up : edit a few preset campaigns by changing the keywords and they are done), add enough links to make the home page PR3 and move on to the next one, total time per autoblog well under 2 hours (that includes adding links which would take most time). Yet I only have a dozen test WPRobot 3 autoblogs because I’m not into autoblogs, I prefer sites that won’t get banned long term (I hate owning throw away sites beyond testing SEO techniques). Not made a new test autoblog since 2010, enjoyed the challenge creating an SEO version of WP Robot which could make an SEO’d autoblog in minutes.
** I’ve never designed a theme look from scratch, I’ve about as much creativity in creating a theme design as a wet sock. I take a popular WordPress theme look and add my search engine code to it. Talian 5 and Stallion 6 both look a lot like Talian 1, but the code is not even close to Talian 1. Can theoretically add my SEO code and features to any theme look, the reason why I don’t is time.
It wasn’t until November last year I took autobloggers into account when I had over a thousand autobloggers buy Talian 5 (even more now). When I made Stallion 6 I added support for the Massive Passive Profits Autoblog Plugin because there’s tens of thousands of autoblogs running Talian 5 (I gave my Talian customers a free Stallion 6 upgrade) and it was a challenge to SEO the Massive Passive Profits plugin output without editing the plugin code (really cool how I did it, even rewrites the output of old MPP autoblogs, working on the same for WPRobot 3 which is even harder).
Stallion 6 is not an autoblog theme by any measure, why would I add manual Tweet buttons and Facebook like buttons for autoblogs? You know as well as I do most autoblogs are rarely manually Tweeted/Liked or commented on for that matter, so why would I add the title comment plugin to an autoblog theme, it would never be used?
I don’t make auto blog themes
David
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
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