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Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Updated in Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Tutorials, WordPress SEO Plugins, Yoast WordPress SEO Tutorial
I understand that nofollow links doesn’t pass pagerank. But many research does suggest that nofollow link still counts as link. It still pass anchor text and some link juice.
And why we should not uses nofollow? I mean who the heck want to make their login page has PR 7? By having several nofollow link, from our homepage to some of our unimportant internal page, at least we keep the link juice to homepage.
(Illustration: homepage with 10 link juice links to 10 pages, 5 nofollowed, thus only passing 5 link juice to 5 followed page, thus keeping 5 link juice to the page itself, thus it ranks higher.)
No?
Cara
I’m afraid the only part of your comment on nofollow that’s correct is
“I mean who the heck want to make their login page has PR 7?”
Everything else is completely wrong.
Nofollow deletes the link benefit, so your example doesn’t save the link benefit for the home page, it is gone. You would be better off having a PR7 login page that links to other parts of your site (recycling some of the link benefit) than nofollowing links to your login page.
Better yet use the Stallion Theme and/or the Stallion Plugin and the vast majority of parts of WordPress you wouldn’t want to waste link benefit on are covered. For example the author link you added to your comment isn’t a text link, it’s a button styled to look like a text link, view source and you’ll see no text link to your website, didn’t have to use nofollow and didn’t waste my link benefit linking to a commenter’s site. As the main admin to this site my author name links are text links, I can also add dofollow links (another Stallion theme feature) : SEO Test Results – Nofollow Links Passing Anchor Text Benefit.
Note if the link above did have a nofollow rel attribute (I could add one like this link SEO Tutorial or turn a Stallion setting on to add one automatically) the Stallion Theme would have converted it to a javascript link (another Stallion Theme feature).
Although there’s been examples of nofollow links anchor text being indexed (done the SEO tests** myself and found that), as a general rule nofollow links don’t exist to Google beyond deleting the link benefit they would have passed.
Go here https://stallion-theme.co.uk/seo-tutorial-for-wordpress/ (note this link isn’t hyperlinked, another Stallion Theme feature preventing WordPress adding a nofollow link) check the first comment, there is a nofollow link test with a unique word as anchor text. Google isn’t supposed to index the anchor text of nofollow links, but if you search for that made up word that page (only that page and the link is over 1 year old) is indexed in Google. This confirms two things.
1. Google isn’t perfect or they changed the way nofollow works again and they treat nofollow anchor text as standard body text currently.
2. Although the anchor text is indexed on the page the link is on, it isn’t passing any anchor text benefit to the page it’s linking to.
Point 2 is the most important one, many webmasters add comments to blogs etc…. and many are nofollow now, the anchor text of the nofollow links are passing no SEO benefit back to the page being linked to. All you are doing is damaging the site the nofollow link is on, each link deletes a fair share of link benefit.
Do the research, I’m not the only SEO expert who does SEO tests, it’s all out there to find.
David
There are some large updates looming in the algorithm and the company that dominates, has been pretty forthright lately about Penguin 2.0 and other changes.
One of the ideas is the more natural your site generally, the better you will do. This includes, not stuffing keywords and natural verbiage in anchor text in links.
However, I have seen on the forums that you should have a ‘healthy balance’ between follow and no-follow links outbound. This is again under the category of ‘natural links’ are rewarded and it is rationalized a natural site would have such a ratio of no-follow to follow.
Although this contradicts my understanding of how Google works, that is there is only so much to go around, so you might as well horde it, rather than dissipate it, I question if SEO is changing? They really are rocket scientists at Google and I imagine the complexities in their search formula go beyond the idea of page rank steering, but more about site trust in complicated ways. They might rationalize a trusted site will no-follow a percentage of links.
Which is too bad if this is the case because I do not have paid links on my site, I only link out because I want to.
It also begs another question, should you link out at all or at least use no-follow when I do. I have been linking out to ‘trusted sites’ and not for pay, rather, I just link out if I find a resource.
I am tempted to put a few non-follow as perhaps my site’s ranking is dampened by not having one no-follow on it?
So just to be clear, the features of the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin ARE NOT built into the Stallion All In One WordPress SEO Theme V7.1.1? It is recommended to use this plugin in addition to this theme?
Yes the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin is not built into the Stallion SEO Theme version 7.1.1.
Update January 2014: The SEO plugin features are part of Stallion Responsive Theme 8.0
Whether to use the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin depends on if you need it, the Stallion theme by default doesn’t link to login and admin parts of the site (I’ve used some unique SEO techniques to not use standard text links) so they shouldn’t be indexed by Google etc…
Question then is do you want parts of your site not indexed without wasting link benefit?
Have you got a lot of Tags that don’t add anything to the sites SEO? For example if you’ve tended to add your Posts to Tags like Tags are the be all and end all of SEO and have Tags with one post in them or almost all the site you might want to consider not indexing tags.
Have you used the monthly archive or calendar widgets and realized they are a mistake SEO wise and removed them, but Google has loads of irrelevant archive type pages indexed, consider not indexing dated archives.
WordPress SEO tip remove WordPress archives that have no value to your users or SEO goals. Note the SEO tip is REMOVE not noindex archives with no user/SEO value, remove them completely. For example what would a tag on this site with the one word “SEO” add to this site? Nothing, practically every post is about SEO. What would a tag called “Money” add to this site? Nothing, there’s a small number of posts discussing money relevant topics, but this site will never rank for a one word SERP like Money.
David
before reading your article, i am using ALL IN ONE SEO plugin but, now its time to change it into yoast plugin. I Hope it will help me to make more money.
Thanks for your post.
I have a question about the best SEO plugins for WordPress.
Am using All in one SEO, SEO by Yoast, All in one Webmaster, and Google XML sitemap.
When I see the plugin setting, they usually have sitemap option.
Do I need all these SEO plugins?
I think some of them need to be uninstalled for performance.
Please give me your opinion which are the best SEO plugins.
Hi David, great work. I too fell into SEO, by growing up in a corporate science environment where a week in the lab was always as good as an hour in the library. Man, I must be a dinosaur but I had to learn how to do all this before indexes were computerized.
So many folks are worried about getting indexed by search engines when the exact opposite is true. Depending on where you are hosted, your content may be snatched up INSTANTLY and indexed. This, alas, is the fate of so many WordPress sites. There is little or no strategy for SEO and as soon as a page is published (and many don’t understand the setting for discouraging search engines) Google picks it up, looks at it, sees crap and puts it in the “visit again in a few months or maybe never” basket. So then you install some plugin, maybe as an afterthought, and start keywording away. Then you fire the SEO people and hire someone else who promises more.
Thank you for providing solid advice with technical and experience to back up that advice. Nice to be able to take things to the next level.
Hi
I am slightly confused with the use of the yoast plugin.
Should I install the plugin and if so which elements should I turn off/not use so not to conflict with or
break your stallion theme?
Many thanks
David Allen
If you are using the Stallion Responsive Theme it’s best not to use the Yoast SEO plugin.
The Yoast plugin doesn’t include many SEO features, those which are important are included in Stallion Responsive either the same or better, so there’s nothing to gain using Yoast with Stallion: I don’t use the Yoast plugin on my sites for example.
So Stallion theme users shouldn’t use Yoast.
That being said I know some will still use the Yoast plugin with Stallion, so I’ve tried to take this into account, but some of the Yoast features break important Stallion SEO features, so be careful.
Since you posted on the Stallion SEO Plugin page, the Stallion SEO Plugin (which is free and can be used with any WordPress theme) can be used with the Yoast SEO plugin to replace the damaging Yoast features.
Yoast isn’t a particularly good plugin, unfortunately the author refuses to follow best SEO practices and includes damaging SEO features (nofollow and noindex) without warning the user.
David
Hi David.
Please excuse my ignorance but I’m struggling with this.
A colleague recently ran a free wesite auditreport for me using SEO Powersuite Website Auditor. Quite a lot for me to get to grips with, some of which I understand, some not quite so!!
One that has been reported though is duplicate rel=canonical statements which are generated by a)Project Supremacy SEO plugin, (that I use to manage my on page projects) and b)Stallion WordPress SEO plugin (that I place great faith in).
Not only are there duplicate rel=canonical statements for the page but they also point to two different pages.
All the pages have been created by the site owner, as an author. Example page: http://www.marshallpersonaltraining.co.uk/author/david_contributor/page/2/
PS line code:
Stallion line code:
In Project Supremacy there is an option to insert a canonical page. If I leave it blank it defaults to the page that you are creating, in this case blog post why-am-i-not-losing-weight.
Stallion WordPress SEO plugin inserts the homepage as a default.
So couple of questions:-
1. Is it dangerous to have duplicate different rel=canonical statements from different plugins (this assumes the same page to redirect to).
2. Can you advise how I should address the above please so I can amend the other pages.
I may need to revert to the Project Supremacy guys but before I do I’d appreciate your input please so I can explain my issue to them with a degree of knowledge (that I’m clearly missing).
Thank you in advance.
Nigel
I’m not familiar with the Project Supremacy SEO Plugin, it’s a premium plugin so I don’t have access to the code.
The problem is there’s a fair number of plugins (and some themes) which add their own canonical URLs and the webmaster needs to choose which one to use: if that’s possible, each plugin is different, some can’t be disabled.
For example these plugins tend to disable the built in WordPress canonicals (WordPress by default has canonical support).
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin – Disables WordPress Core Canonical Support When Required
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin – Disables ALL WordPress Core Canonical Support
All In One SEO Plugin – Disables ALL WordPress Core Canonical Support
Project Supremacy Plugin (according to your comment)
The Stallion SEO plugin has code to disable the canonicals from Yoast and All In One when the Stallion canonicals are created, otherwise there would be duplicate canonicals similar to your current issue. Assuming the Project Supremacy SEO Plugin is adding the Author archive canonicals (my guess is it’s a plugin bug that they are loaded on Author archives) your choice is disable the Project Supremacy canonicals or the Stallion canonicals: to disable the Stallion canonical tick “Index All Author Archives” and Stallion reverts to core WordPress behaviour on Author archives.
Currently your canonicals don’t make sense.
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin overrides the WordPress core canonical support when the canonical output is different to the WordPress core canonicals.
For example on the Author Archive Pages if you’ve ticked the Stallion plugin option “Index First Author Archives Only : Block Paged 2,3,4…” (which you have ticked) on the Author Archives ALL pages will have the same canonical so only one of the webpages are indexed.
So these pages will all have identical Stallion canonicals:
/author/david_contributor//author/david_contributor/page/2/
/author/david_contributor/page/3/
etc....
They all have a canonical to /author/david_contributor/, this tells Google to spider them all, BUT only index the first page (the one set as the canonical). The SEO benefit of this is link benefit and SEO benefit from pages 2,3,4 etc… is partially recovered (we loose ~15% of the link benefit via a canonical URL) and concentrated on to the first page. With these types of archives there’s no point having pages 2,3,4 indexed, they won’t rank for anything, so makes sense to recover most of the link/SEO benefit via a canonical URL.
So you have a good Stallion plugin setting IF you want the Author archives indexed.
Looking at the output of your Author archives they are showing one Post per page, so the content is almost identical to the one Post shown: not ideal SEO wise or user friendliness.
You have a similar output on Categories and Tags, you’ve presumably set “Settings” > “Reading” : “Blog pages show at most” to 1. This is not a good idea SEO wise, I’d suggest setting to at least 5, so up to 5 Posts load on each archive output.
You have something weird going on with either a plugin or the theme because a canonical to a Post on an Author Archive isn’t default WordPress behaviour (Project Supremacy SEO Plugin bug maybe).
On Category archives no canonicals are added : nothing wrong with this it’s core WordPress output (you don’t NEED a canonical on every page).
On Tag archives no canonicals are added : nothing wrong with this it’s core WordPress output.
On Author archives the canonical points to the one Post shown : with the one Post per page output this does sort of make sense, the author archives are sort of a duplicate of the Posts. Not how I’d do it, every time you add a new Post the canonical URL on these change because the Post loaded changes:
/author/david_contributor//author/david_contributor/page/2/
/author/david_contributor/page/3/
etc....
Today the above canonicals point to:
/author/david_contributor/ - URL Of Post Three/author/david_contributor/page/2/ - URL Of Post Two
/author/david_contributor/page/3/ - URL Of Post One
Add a new Post tomorrow and they change to:
/author/david_contributor/ - URL Of Post Four/author/david_contributor/page/2/ - URL Of Post Three
/author/david_contributor/page/3/ - URL Of Post Two
Add another Post and they change again and again and again…
That is not how to use canonical URLs, if you’ve been advised to setup your site this way, whoever gave you that advice doesn’t understand how Google works on passing SEO value through canonical URLs. Canonical URLs are like soft 301 redirects and shouldn’t be changed regularly.
Add to this the Category and Tags have a similar output to the Author archives, but lack the canonicals to the one Post loaded. Ignoring the Stallion plugin canonicals right now you have pretty much duplicate category/tag/author archive output and the author archive canonical is informing Google the author archives are a duplicate of the one Post loaded, so only index the Post. But also index the duplicate category and tag output! Doesn’t make sense SEO wise.
If a Post is added to 2 categories and 3 tags it’s duplicated at least 6 times (the 6th is the Author archive), but only one of the duplicates has a canonical to the one Post. Right now all your categories, tags and author archives are a waste of SEO space, they add no SEO value to the site (aren’t even user friendly) AND wastes link benefit: even if you got your canonicals right for the one Post setup (all your archives having the canonical pointing to the one Post loaded: which is a bad idea, see earlier) it still costs link benefit having 6 versions of the same content spidered (each canonical costs ~15% of that pages link benefit).
If it were my site I’d dump the Author archives completely (might require modifying the theme to remove the author archive links: Stallion Responsive for example has the option to hide the links) and the tags completely (simply delete all the tags) and limit each Post to 2 categories (unless there’s a good reason for more than 2).
Set “Settings” > “Reading” : “Blog pages show at most” to at least 5 (set higher to limit wasted link benefit) and allow the Categories to either be fully indexed or index first page only (Stallion options “Index All Categories^^” or “Index First Categories Only : Block Paged 2,3,4…^^”).
This will limit the number of archives to a minimum, having Posts added to two categories is more than enough to keep Posts spidered/indexed etc… since you’ll have far fewer archives allowing more link benefit to flow to your important content (your Posts). Every webpage that’s linked to costs link benefit even if you use canonical URLs to recover the link benefit (can’t recover it all), so if a webpage has no value (Author Archives and Dated Archives for example) get rid of them (don’t link to them).
BTW I noticed on Posts (view the HTML source of a Post) the Project Supremacy Plugin is adding meta description tags, meta keywords tags and meta robots tags (the meta keywords tags are ignored by Google, the robots output is default behaviour and so aren’t needed) listed under “Open Graph Data Supplied By Project Supremacy”. Those three meta tags aren’t Open Graph Data (there’s no Open Graph Data on the Posts I viewed), so might be a case of the plugin developers don’t know what they are doing (or they’ve labelled it badly).
You also have “Google Site Verification by Project Supremacy” on every page (only needed on the Home page), once you’ve verified a site with Google you can safely remove that code, the Google verification code is also added twice (maybe the theme adds it as well?). In Stallion Responsive for example the Google verification code only loads on the home page and I have it set so on each theme update that and similar one time verification meta tags are emptied. It’s a minor issue, but removing unnecessary features is a positive for SEO performance, sites load faster.
David
As comprehensive a response as ever David, thank you.
Your response post title made me smile but of course it says what it needs to say.
I need to work through this very slowly and carefully to understand what I have to do and to maybe go back to the Project Supremacy developers, if that is what’s required.
Probably the New Year before I do that but I’m sure I will be back with more questions.
Thanks for all your help and advise.
Merry Christmas to you and your family.
Nigel
Evening David.
I’ve received a couple of Wordfence error reports that this plugin has been removed from the WordPress.org repository.
Have you replaced this with anything else?
Also if you are not updating it any further is it still safe to leave on any of my sites?
thanks
Nigel
I removed all my plugins (four of them) including the Stallion plugin from the repository, see: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-removed-from-repository-2/
There’s nothing wrong with the code and I still plan to develop them further and as you can read above if the old plugin repository version ever became a security issue I’ll post an update to the WordPress support forum (the support forums still exist, see the link above).
The reason for removing my plugins…
The Display Widgets plugin (which I created a better forked version) was sold to a new developer.
I informed the plugin repository that the new developer of the Display Widgets plugin was breaking at least two repository rules.
WordPress deleted the Display Widgets plugin twice from the repository, see: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/upgrading-the-display-widgets-plugin-to-the-display-widgets-seo-plus-plugin/ and https://wordpress.org/support/topic/display-widgets-plugin-v2-6-1-deleted-from-the-plugin-repository/
Had I not interceded the new developer could have tracked the visitor data of up to 200,000 WordPress sites without the permission of the site owners or the site visitors (that’s illegal).
Eventually the new developer made enough changes to pass the basic rules of keeping a plugin in the repository: basically a plugin can do almost anything that’s not malicious as long as the plugin users are informed.
Now the new developer can only track visitors when the site owner activates a feature (I would guess few WordPress users will activate it), though the sites with it active will have their site visitors tracked without the permission of the visitors!
I asked a question about the Display Widget plugin tracking MY user data without MY permission (I’m legally entitled to request that information and the only contact info I had was the support forum), see: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/display-widgets-plugin-geolocation-tracking-visitors-without-permission/.
This was enough to get a moderator warning!
Apparently a person affected by a WordPress plugin in the repository can’t ask why their data is being tracked etc…!!!
The Display Widgets developer was a dick and posted https://wordpress.org/support/topic/display-widgets-plugin-geolocation-tracking-visitors-without-permission/#post-9298685 which I responded to.
Few days later my posts are unfairly moderated on the WordPress forum!
I can’t work under that scenario so removed my plugins from the repository and have no plans to add them back.
Although I didn’t ask for the moderation to be lifted, when I emailed WordPress to have my plugins removed I explained why and it was confirmed I deserved the moderation (which is total bull!). Though interestingly after removing the plugins and posting three forum posts stating why the plugin are gone the moderation of my posts was lifted: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-removed-from-repository-3/
Future plans…
My original plan was to add over a dozen new SEO plugins to the free plugin repository to build a following to support other projects, but that plan is out the window now. Not easy to build a large following for a free plugin outside the repository.
Will probably go premium plugins for everything now, so there’s a good chance version 3.0.0 of the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin is the last free version.
Shame really, as the next update (worth of v4.0.0) uses Yoast and All In One SEO title tag data etc… making it better than Yoast/All In One SEO in terms of SEO output. Was planning to build a bunch of free plugins that work together to provide the sort of features only found in the Stallion Responsive Theme that would work for any theme.
David
Hello,
I searched by WordPress Org but I couldn’t find your plugin.
Second, is your plugin tested for WordPress Version 4.9?
Kind regards Klaus
Dave has contributed mightily over the years to WordPress site owners and even to ensuring their security, but his days of creating this plugin and the even more amazing stallion theme are over. The plugin is no longer available in the WordPress plugins repository.