The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin was updated to version 3.0.0 on the 20th November 2016 including detailed Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Documentation.
Version 3.0.0 is a major update, adds new features including new WordPress SEO Plugin Warning Pages Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Warnings, Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Warnings and All In One SEO Plugin Warnings.
Yoast SEO Warnings
ALL Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Yoast SEO Warnings
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugins includes a feature to list all Yoast SEO Noindex settings which are potentially SEO damaging. Noindex wastes PageRank/link benefit and in general should NOT be used.
SEO > Search Appearance – Content Types : Posts
Show Posts in search results? “NO” Selected : Yoast Noindex Posts SEO Warnings.
SEO > Search Appearance – Content Types : Pages
Show Pages in search results? “NO” Selected : Yoast Noindex Pages SEO Warning.
SEO > Search Appearance – Media : Media & attachment URLs
Show Media in search results? “NO” Selected : Yoast Noindex Media SEO Warning.
SEO > Search Appearance – Taxonomies : Categories
Show Categories in search results? “NO” Selected : Yoast Noindex Categories SEO Warnings.
SEO > Search Appearance – Taxonomies : Tags
Show Tags in search results? “NO” Selected : Yoast Noindex Tags SEO Warnings.
SEO > Search Appearance – Taxonomies : Format
Show Formats in search results? “NO” Selected : Yoast Noindex Custom Taxonomies SEO Warnings.
SEO > Search Appearance – Archives : Author Archives
Show author archives in search results? “NO” Selected : Yoast Noindex Author Archives SEO Warnings.
SEO > Search Appearance – Archives : Date Archives
Show date archives in search results? “NO” Selected : Yoast Noindex Date Archives SEO Warnings.
All In One SEO Warnings
ALL Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin All In One SEO Warnings
For Yoast and All In One SEO, the new SEO warning pages list which plugin features (section wide noindex and nofollow features) are potentially causing serious SEO damage. Even if you don’t want to use the Stallion SEO Plugin features, install/activate Stallion, check your Yoast/All In One SEO options, fix any problems, deactivate Stallion.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Download
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin is hosted at the WordPress Plugin Repository at Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Download: I removed the SEO plugin from the repository.
Install Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Also see my other free WordPress SEO Plugins: Display Widgets SEO Plus Plugin and the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin.
What Is the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin?
I’m sure you are aware of the basic title tag and meta tag features built into SEO plugins like Yoast and All In One SEO. The Stallion SEO Plugin version 3.0.0 does NOT manipulate title tags or meta tags: I plan to add more SEO features to the Stallion plugin including support for Yoast and All In One SEO title tags and meta tags (similar to what’s built in to the Stallion WordPress SEO Theme) in the future.
Version 3.0.0 includes an SEO feature called Not Index, Not Index is based on canonical URLs which recover link benefit (PageRank : PR) which would be lost if noindex robots meta tags were used. The Stallion Not Index SEO feature is a replacement for the SEO damaging noindex robots meta tag features (noindex wastes link benefit) built into SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and All In One SEO.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Not Index Options
When Yoast/All In One SEO noindex options are replaced by Stallion Not Index options, most of the wasted link benefit is recovered.
Not only does the Stallion Not Index options replace the damaging noindex features of Yoast and All In One SEO, Not Index can also be used to concentrate link benefit and rankings on the first page of Categories, Tags (all important WordPress Archives) and the first page of multiple comment paged Posts and Static Pages.
See the screenshot above and below, specifically options like:
WordPress Category Archives : Index First Categories Only : Block Paged 2,3,4…^^
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Index First Category Page
When set Pages 2,3,4,5…. of a Category Archive set will include a canonical URL to the first page of the Category archive set. This suggests to Google etc… that Pages 2,3,4,5…. of the Category should be spidered (Google will follow the links to pages 2,3,4,5 etc… and to the Posts linked from those Category pages), BUT only index (index means the webpage can be found with relevant Google searches) Category Page 1 AND pass most of the SEO link benefit AND ranking benefit (from Pages 2,3,4,5….) to the first Page.
In SEO terms it’s like having a single huge webpage for each Category Archive with most of the SEO benefit concentrated on that one webpage. The reason for doing this is Categories when optimized can gain SERPs (direct Google traffic) in their own right, BUT it tends to be Page 1 in the set which gains the SERPs: Pages 2,3,4,5…. tend to gain no direct SERPs/traffic (no point indexing them).
This can also be true for other archives: Tags, Search Results, Custom Taxonomies, Custom Post Type Archives and even Author Archives: the dated archives are never going to gain SERPs, best SEO practice is don’t use dated archive widgets.
The option:
WordPress Paged Comments on Posts and Pages : Index Main Post/Page Only : Block Paged Comments 2,3,4…
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Index First Paged Comment
Is for sites with Posts/Pages with a lot of comments and you’ve set under “Settings” > “Discussion” : “Other comment settings” – “Break comments into pages with #”.
This setting results in Posts/Pages with Paged Comments which with most WordPress themes tend to have almost identical title tags. Having identical title tags isn’t best SEO practice : the Stallion Responsive Theme includes a feature to give the Paged Comments unique title tags.
If your Paged Comments have almost identical title tags set the option above. This concentrates the SEO benefit in the same way as described for Category Archives: the first page of the Post/Page will gain most of the link benefit and SEO rankings generated by the entire Paged Comments set.
Performance SEO Plugin Features
For performance SEO reasons it is advisable on heavily commented sites to set the “Settings” > “Discussion” : “Other comment settings” – “Break comments into pages with #” option to break Posts/Pages with lots of comments into small chunks.
If you have a Post for example with 100 comments, you do NOT want them all loading on one webpage, this can be a significant performance hit. A good example of how NOT to setup a WordPress site for best SEO performance is the yoast.com site.
Yoast WordPress Post (October 9th 2014).
This is the URL to the live Google PageSpeed Insights Tool Test: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=yoast.com%2Fopinion-on-sliders%2F
Mobile Page Speed Insights Yoast SEO Post
Mobile 27/100
Desktop 54/100
User Experience 98/100
Mobile and Desktop is in the red, not good! I was shocked when I saw 27/100 for mobile, that’s awful!
Update: November 2016 results
Mobile 44/100
Desktop 51/100
User Experience 99/100
The above are still awful performance SEO results for a site that sell SEO services and develops one of the most widely used WordPress SEO plugins!!!
Why you shouldn’t use WordPress SEO Plugins that use Nofollow
WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, All In One SEO and Squirrly SEO should not be used because nofollow deletes link benefit, it’s as simple as that.
Google changed the way nofollow works some years ago (2008), unfortunately many WordPress SEO experts either don’t keep up to date with changes in SEO techniques or they don’t care: it’s an easy way to gain traffic touting a WordPress SEO plugin even if it is flawed/SEO damaging: see Is Yoast the Best WordPress SEO Plugin? for details.
Don’t believe nofollow deletes link benefit, do some research and find what Matt Cutt’s (he works for Google) had to say about Google’s change to nofollow back in June 2009:
So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
Source: Matt Cutt’s PageRank sculpting
Still not convinced watch this YouTube video by Matt Cutts.
Note Matt Cutts says the PageRank that goes through nofollow links “evaporates or disappears”. Nofollow deletes link benefit, never use it!!!
That’s straight from Google, nofollow deletes link benefit, DO NOT use NOFOLLOW.
Quick SEO Tip Nofollow Deletes Link Benefit
Or what about from Rand Fishkin at Moz:
This is a disappointing move from Google on many fronts:
It allows malicious operators to actively hurt a site by adding nofollowed links in comments, forums and other open submission arenas.
It removes the protection webmasters thought was afforded by nofollowing links (you may not get hurt for linking to spam or paid links directly, but you’re now indirectly hurting your site’s PageRank flow)
Source: Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow
Note how Rand Fishkin (respected SEO expert) considers adding nofollowed links a malicious SEO act!!! Yes, you could actively damage your competitors rankings by commenting on their WordPress driven sites if the comment links are nofollow!
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Tutorials
Stallion Not Index Tutorials
- WordPress SEO Tutorial Login Page
- WordPress SEO Tutorial Date Archives
- WordPress SEO Tutorial Author Archives
- WordPress SEO Tutorial Search Result Archives
- WordPress SEO Tutorial Category Archives
- WordPress SEO Tutorial Tag Archives
- WordPress SEO Tutorial Home Page Archives
- WordPress SEO Tutorial Paginated Comments
Stallion SEO Warnings Tutorials
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Warnings
- Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Date Archives Tutorial
- Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Author Archives Tutorial
- Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Category Archives Tutorial
- Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Tag Archives Tutorial
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Warnings
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Noindex Posts Tutorial
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Noindex Pages Tutorial
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Noindex Media Tutorial
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Noindex Categories Tutorial
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Noindex Tags Tutorial
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Noindex Author Archives Tutorial
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Noindex Date Archives Tutorial
All In One SEO Plugin Warnings
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
Hi Dave,
This is cool. Please let me know when it’s done, I buy it :)
Regards,
Gabor
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin is a free plugin, can be downloaded from https://wordpress.org/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/
David
This is useful as one of my sites is using the 2010 theme until bbPress irons out theme compatibility issues and comes out of beta.
However, if I use this with the Stallion theme, does it have additional benefits? That is, does it do things Stallion does not do and you recommend using this with the Stallion?
Or if you are using Stallion this WordPress SEO plugin’s functionality is covered in Stallion so would be doubling up code?
I will test it regardless on my 2010 theme and if it does what it says, it is worth me (or others) clicking a 5 start rating on the WP extends website.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin and SEO Theme
The Stallion SEO Theme covers the ‘blocking’ of WordPress login pages by not linking to them in the first place with normal text links (Stallion theme uses form buttons to ‘hide’ the links protecting link benefit), so with the Stallion theme you don’t waste link benefit linking to login pages.
Other than that all the other SEO features of the Stallion plugin are new and add to the SEO of the Stallion theme. If you use any other WordPress theme I’m not aware of a single theme (or plugin) that covers any of what the Stallion plugin does. Similar SEO plugins use nofollow and noindex which are damaging.
You can kind of achieve some (not all) of the SEO features of the Stallion plugin by organising your blog correctly, like not using the dated archive widgets, not using broken WordPress plugins that allow parts of the plugin to be indexed, not creating loads of categories and tags (for most sites you only really need categories OR tags) but even then it’s not perfect (monthly archives, login/admin pages can still be indexed) and there’s no other plugin/theme that can redirect link benefit from home archives, categories, tags and search results whilst allowing your visitors to still use those aspects of the site, so I’ll be using this plugin on all my sites (takes time to install on 70+ WordPress installations: have it running on ~20 domains so far).
I’ve known for a long time how best to use WordPress for SEO and for years I’ve NOT used the monthly archive widgets on any of my sites (70-80 WordPress installations) for SEO reasons, but Google still manages to find some of the monthly archive pages despite the lack of links to them. If a page is indexed long term in Google there’s probably a link to it, either an internal link or an incoming link. The monthly archives have no SEO value (they’ll never rank for any useful searches, so no value having them indexed using link benefit) so any link benefit to them (from internal/incoming links) is partially wasted. The Stallion plugin recovers this link benefit like a 301 redirect.
If you’ve been running a blog for years and made the SEO mistake of using the monthly (or any dated) archives widgets (calendar widget as well) the Stallion SEO plugin will recover the wasted link benefit. The Stallion theme has never stopped users adding a monthly archive widget, (seriously considered removing those widgets) I’ve always advised users not to use dated archives (not everyone follows that SEO advise) and I set the Stallion custom monthly archive widget so it’s only loaded on the home pages so there isn’t 12+ sitewide links to date archives (such a waste of link benefit). If you’ve been using the standard sort of blog setup with monthly archives with the Stallion SEO theme you are still wasting link (not as much as with 99% of other themes). The Stallion SEO plugin will recycle this link benefit even if you keep the dated archives widget.
WordPress login and admin pages are regularly indexed (some by accident), the SEO plugin recovers any link benefit wasted and basically noindex those page (canonical URLs are like 301 redirects to Google).
A combination of the Stallion SEO theme and the Stallion SEO plugin covers almost all aspects of onsite SEO: running out of true SEO features to add :-)
David
New WordPress SEO Plugin Features
Thank you for the very detailed explanation. The only deviation from your recommended settings is I use both tags and categories. I have to drill down to determine which is the most beneficial.
However, I am leaving them both fully indexed just in case. I do not know if this will create a waste of link juice or duplicate content. But my sites tend to be more tag oriented and just do not know if I should restrict some levels of categories so I will not.
End of Onsite SEO with Stallion SEO Plugin and SEO Theme
What you described is how I’m using the Stallion SEO plugin settings, the settings other than the Categories and Tags are very easy to decide on (the recommended settings ** and ^^ settings, for 95%+ of sites).
The Categories and Tags settings depends on the site setup, which type of archive do you use most and which are better SEO’d.
Categories WordPress SEO
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I tend to use Categories as my main archives others use Tags, some use both. SEO wise there’s not much difference between them (the HTML output is the same), what I would avoid is a duplication of the same content through both sets. You wouldn’t generally create two Categories/Tags with the same content since it adds no SEO value.
A site about WordPress for example could have Categories and or Tags about each version of WordPress, WordPress 3.0, WordPress 3.1, WordPress 3.2 and all versions in between. Many site owners see Categories as their main archives, maybe a Category called “WordPress” and an almost free for all on the Tags with Tags, “WordPress 3.0”, “WordPress 3.1”, “WordPress 3.2” and all the versions in between and will link anything related to WordPress into the Category “WordPress” and all the above Tags.
The problem with this is the content (the Posts) that are listed in these Categories and Tags can be almost identical, the page you are reading now would fit in all the Categories and Tags I listed above and so would most of the posts on this site. This means on archive pages with this sort of setup the tags and categories are not unique, the only real difference is the name of the Categories/Tags and Google is smart enough to know this and will tend to consider some of the Categories/Tags duplicate and won’t index them.
Even worse than this is Tags for pretty much any word (not even keywords) used in a post (auto tag plugins are terrible for this), Tags usage like this are such a waste of link benefit! Unless you have a lot of link benefit entering a site (lots of high quality backlinks) a general rule of thumb is try to only create pages that can generate search engine traffic in their own right or at least support important pages because you can’t afford to waste link benefit.
If you have a setup like this I would look at the incoming search engine traffic and see which archives it’s coming from. If you find your hundreds of Tags aren’t actually generating any search engine traffic consider recycling the link benefit and concentrate on a smaller number of Categories.
It’s become difficult to obtain single word SERPs especially ones with any traffic attached to them, I no longer even bother optimizing for single keyword SERPs (Tags on most sites tend to be single keywords). Easier to aim for two or more keyword SERPs and Categories are quite good for two and three keyword SERPs.
David
Best WordPress SEO Plugin Settings
how about some more details on how your plugin achieves this magic? maybe some screenshots too?
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin works because Google and other major search engines treat canonical URLs like permanent 301 redirects without the browser redirect.
Anyone into search engine optimization knows when you move a site to a new domain or move a page you add a 301 permanent redirect to pass the link benefit and rankings to the new domain/page.
301 redirects not only redirect the link benefit and search engine rankings they also redirect visitors to the new domain/page.
Canonical URLs act in the same way as 301 redirects but do not redirect the visitor in the browser window which means we can use them to recover link benefit from pages like monthly archives while still allowing our visitors to browse those pages. Google even recommends if you don’t have access to your sites server in a way you can add 301 redirects, use canonical URLs it will be treated as a 301 redirect in relation to link benefit (PageRank) and search engine rankings.
WordPress already uses canonical URLs to redirect the link benefit and search engine rankings from the dynamic post URLs to the search engine friendly permalinks. WordPress also uses canonical URLs on paged comments. If you have the setting “Settings >> Discussions : Break comments into pages” ticked and you have pages with enough comments to generate multiple pages of comments, pages 2, 3, 4 etc… have canonical URLs to the main post/page.
I’ve extended this concept to sections of a WordPress blog users might not want indexing. I was very surprised no one had thought of doing this before, all other WordPress SEO Plugins use a combination of nofollow and noindex which is SEO damaging!
I’ve added a screenshot to the main post above of the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugins Settings page.
David
Canonical URLs are Like Permanent 301 Redirects to Google SEO
ah, thanks for the screen shot. btw, what does block do? I mean where does it redirect the pagerank to?
and what about the other features of the so-called damaging plugins?
I understand that your method is better but the other plugins also help with meta keywords and descriptions…
Block means do the equivalent of noindex a page (not-index) whilst redirecting the link benefit to the home page or 1st page of paged categories/tags etc… by using a canonical URL instead of a noindex robots meta tag.
I think I’m the first person to use canonical URLs this way by design, so there’s no ‘official’ term for what this is called.
Maybe a canonical 301 redirect.
If you aren’t familiar with the noindex robots meta tag (which is what all the other WordPress SEO plugins use to noindex a page) it works as follows.
A page with a noindex robots meta tag will be spidered by Google, but won’t be indexed. This means the Google search engine spider (Googlebot) and other major search engine spiders follows links from a noindex page (as long as the robots meta tag doesn’t include nofollow as well), but when it comes to Google searches it won’t be found for any search results that that page may have gained (to the search engines the page doesn’t exist).
This means the link benefit that would be used to gain rankings on a noindex page is wasted.
With the Stallion WordPress SEO plugin a canonical URL is used instead of a noindex robots meta tag which stops the page from being indexed (like noindex) but recycles the link benefit back to home etc…
If you have a WordPress blog with say 1,000 pages and use the monthly archives widget with 12 months shown, you are wasting 12 links from every page of your site, that’s 12,000 wasted links!!! By using the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin and ticking the “Block All Date Archives” radio box you’ll recycle the wasted link benefit (PageRank) from those 12,000 links (it will be 301 redirected back to the home page). That’s a lot of recycled link benefit.
It’s even worse for those who use the Calendar widget, that widget generates a daily archive, if you have a site that you post one post per day for 3 months (90 posts) you generate 90 archive pages with only one post per page! On every page you’ll have approximately 30 links to these daily archives and they have no SEO value. Just a 90 post site could easily have 2,700 wasted links!
It’s all recoverable using the Stallion SEO Plugin.
David
Noindex a Page Using Canonical 301 Redirect
I’ve written detailed reviews on two of the most popular WordPress SEO Plugins
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin Review
I struggle with understanding why a WordPress site would need the equivalent of two post titles which is the main feature of most WordPress SEO Plugins?
When you create a post or page you give it a title, if you are thinking SEO when you make a new post you’d add a relevant keyword rich title and that would be used through out WordPress for internal links, title elements etc… WordPress SEO plugins add an override title that’s used for the title element of a page.
This post is called “Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin” and those are the relevant keywords I want this page to rank for. Unless you regularly write awful titles that are not search engine friendly, why need an override title?
David
Popular WordPress SEO Plugin Reviews
You made the comment that you have done everything possible to SEO on site factors. I have lived and breathed WP SEO for years now and have made my living with my online empire. I do not know if you have done everything as we never know what we are not aware of and what is behind the wall ( so to speak).
However, reviewing plugins and themes you are on the cutting edge and the best by eons. I have one sites where I do some reviews of WP things and if I ever get a chance I can review this plugin. I will send you a link when or if I get around to doing this.
So I think you with the current understanding of search engines, have done what needs to be done with the small improvements here and there as they change.
Interesting to note the Matt Cutts has said that in the future the Google formula could be open source. But not now as it can still be gamed. Your theme does not game the system but rather trims the fat from useless parts of the a web structure. I think website structure and navigation is key of a lot of SEO.
Now all that flattery aside I think there are always ways to improve things with your theme so I hope you keep researching and testing your theme and plugin to push the frontier of the unknown back.
I have often said the only reason I do not have a few million in the bank is ignorance. If I had perfect information the money would flow in faster. So the question is with your theme, what is it that you do not know? What is behind the wall? I think maybe now that many on site factors have been perfected, develop, promotional, navigation, design or something out of the box in terms of thinking that would be a real breakthrough with web SEO/SEM, who knows what could be developed further.
As mentioned before, my SEO friend and I brainstorm, as we are looking to increase promotional aspects, what the next big thing or wave is, improvements in CTR even further legally and subtle design things that might increase time on site etc. Anyway, off the subject of your plugin.
P.S. I meant to write this in the above comment but I was distracted by my daughter the 2 year old alpha child jumping on the sofa.
On Site WordPress SEO Factors
Actually I said
“A combination of the Stallion SEO theme and the Stallion SEO plugin covers almost all aspects of on-site SEO: running out of true SEO features to add :-)”
Note the words on-site and true. I want to add more off-site features (backlinks, social media) and on-site more features that aren’t really true SEO features (a Facebook like button won’t increase Google rankings for example, but it’s useful to gain more traffic). I’m always looking for more ways to improve SEO safely though.
With a CMS like WordPress it’s harder to get perfect SEO on a single WordPress page than creating a standalone HTML page. For example the perfect SEO page would only link to pages with relevance to that pages content using relevant keyword rich anchor text, easy to achieve (though very time consuming) with a standalone HTML page, much harder with a post within WordPress because you have the automated menu links etc… that won’t always have ONLY relevant links.
However what you gain from creating standalone HTML pages is far outweighed by the advantages of using a CMS like WordPress, automation of menu links, linking related posts together etc… it’s not perfect SEO, but from a WordPress perspective it’s as close to perfect as you can get in a reasonable amount of time from something that’s very automated: if you’ve been making sites by hand in the past you know what a pain it is to make sure everything links together when you add new pages to a site.
What I’ve set out to achieve with Stallion is to make it very easy for anyone to create search engine optimized site even if they don’t really know what SEO is, but do understand what a keyword is: all a person has to do is write keyword rich content and Stallion does the rest on-site.
This alone won’t get a site ranked high because all sites need a reasonable amount of aged backlinks to rank well long term, if a website owner uses Stallion theme + Stallion plugin, writes keyword rich content and can build incoming links, long term they should gain decent search engine traffic.
Stallion theme/plugin takes most of the guess work out of search engine optimization and removes most of the SEO mistakes built into WordPress (and some SEO mistakes added bu some plugin authors!), but there’s more to a website than just SEO and that’s where I’m trying to head in the future (cover non-SEO stuff).
David
Stallion SEO Theme + Stallion SEO Plugin is Close to Perfect On-site WordPress SEO
You say that “The settings marked ** are highly recommended settings for most WordPress blogs.” However, two of those settings are not on by default. For a plugin of this sort, I think, the recommended settings should be on out of the box.
The Stallion plugin default settings do not prevent the indexing of any user generated content, they are the safe settings that if a user activates the SEO plugin and never looks at the settings page it won’t cause any SEO harm.
If I set the recommended settings as the default plugin settings pages like the monthly archives would be de-indexed.
I’ve set it that way because a plugin shouldn’t make that sort of decision for a user without their input. They should understand what a setting does before accepting it.
I can’t think of any SEO benefit to having monthly archives indexed beyond a basic sitemap (Categories and/or Tags are better), but a user might want them indexed for other reasons.
The Author archives again have no SEO value on 99% of WordPress sites, but if a site has multiple authors and those authors are popular de-indexing them may remove relevant SERPs to their usernames. Most WordPress blogs don’t have multiple authors, but if I assumed this it could damage some sites.
The Category and Tag settings are based on how you use them, some sites you’ll want them both fully indexed, others only one set, those settings definitely needs user input.
If you run a lot of WordPress blogs and don’t want to mess around with the settings (just want to activate and it’s setup as you want it) as long as you upload the Stallion plugin using FTP or the plugin installer (when you upload a zip file) you could edit the Stallion plugin file stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php and give it new defaults.
It’s the list that determines the initial defaults when the plugin is first activated:
add_option(st_seo_notindex_login, '2');add_option(st_seo_notindex_admin, '2');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_date, '1');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_author, '1');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_search, '0');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_tags, '0');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_category, '0');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_home, '1');
The recommended settings (I use these settings on most sites) would be:
add_option(st_seo_notindex_login, '2');add_option(st_seo_notindex_admin, '2');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_date, '2');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_author, '2');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_search, '2');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_tags, '2');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_category, '0');
add_option(st_seo_notindex_home, '2');
David
Stallion WordPress Plugin Default SEO Settings
Hi David
Thank you for all of the above information, I am quite new to the WordPress SEO scene and learning all the time so please forgive my ignorance, one of the main reasons I used the all in one seo pack was for the SEO title tag and meta description tag for the serps, do you suggest additional plugins to show the SEO title tag and meta description tags?
Regards
Spencer
The Title Element/title Tag of a page is very important SEO wise and the Stallion SEO theme has the best built in title elements, so if you are one of my theme customers you don’t need a plugin for setting title elements.
WordPress SEO Plugins like the All In One SEO Plugin got big because the vast majority of WordPress themes had the title element with this format:
Name of Site : Title of PostThis is not the best title element setup, the best (for most sites) is
Title of PostEven today very few WordPress themes use this structure (really easy to add to a theme as well).
Most WordPress SEO plugins that override this format suggest this format is good SEO wise:
Title of Post : Name of SiteWhich SEO wise is not much difference to the average WordPress theme setup.
You can set your titles to the best SEO format with most of the plugins that allow you to manipulate the titles
Title of Postincluding the All In One SEO plugin, so if you aren’t using the Stallion SEO theme and don’t understand how to change the header.php file you can improve the title elements of your posts etc… You don’t need this feature if you use the Stallion SEO theme (any of my WordPress themes : been using the best title element setup for 5+ years).
You can also override your articles titles using the All In One SEO plugin, but if you name your posts with SEO in mind I don’t see why you’d need a second area for adding a title element? This post for example is about the “Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin” so I named the post “Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin” which is used as the title element since I use the Stallion SEO theme which has the best title element setup. If I used another WordPress theme it might be “Stallion WordPress SEO Theme : Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin” which isn’t ideal.
So the ability to manipulate the title element is important, but can be easily achieved at theme level.
Plugins that offer meta keywords tags is a waste of time, it’s been years since Google gave any SEO benefit to the keywords within the meta keywords tag which is why I don’t use it on my sites. It’s built into the Stallion SEO theme because users expect it, but it’s a waste of time and bandwidth.
The meta description tag does have some value, but not ranking value. Whatever you put in the meta description tag is ignored for ranking purposes by Google. If the descriptions read like an ad and Google uses it for it’s search results it could increase your click through rate from Google. What this means is if you are ranked number 3 today and add an awesome description it will still be 3 after Google indexed the change, but if Google uses it and visitors to Google are scanning through the top 3 results and not necessarily clicking the first result as a matter of course it might increase the number of clicks you get (it might increase traffic a little bit).
The Stallion SEO Theme uses the excerpt from a post for the meta description, you can set a custom excerpt when you create or edit a post, if you don’t set one Stallion will use the first few lines of the post. This is basically the same as you get with the SEO plugins.
If you use another theme it probably won’t include built in custom description meta tags, there is no harm in using the All In One SEO Plugin to set your meta description tags or harm by setting your title elements either (as long as you name them with SEO in mind). What you should avoid is using these SEO plugins for noindexing parts of a site and nofollowing links, those features are SEO damaging.
I have a list of other SEO plugins at WordPress SEO Plugins, some have obvious SEO benefits, others just useful.
David
WordPress SEO Plugins Title Tag and Meta Description Tag
Hi David Thank you for the reply
Spencer
Hi, If i use the ALL IN ONE SEO plugin, there is boxes to fill in for the home page title, description and keywords.
But in the STALLION wordpress SEO Plugin, there is no these options. Is there anyway I can put in the home page title, description and keywords on stallion without using the ALL IN ONE SEO?
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin deals with link benefit conservation.
You can still use other plugins like the All In One SEO Plugin and the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin to over ride your titles and meta descriptions but be careful with the other options related to nofollow and noindex they are SEO damaging.
David
Hi David,
I am quite new to SEO and was installing plug-ins for website. I ‘was’ using All in one SEO plugin and Google XML Sitemap plugin. However, I heard that WordPress SEO handled both of those plug-ins, so I went and installed that.
However, you say that Stallion WP SEO is a better replacement to WordPress SEO. I just have one burning question before, I decide whether or not to use this. Does it handle Google XML Sitemap duties?
thanks!
Google XML Sitemap Plugin
The Stallion SEO Plugin doesn’t include Google XML features.
David