For Stallion SEO Theme users, the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin is a stand alone plugin (doesn’t need the Stallion theme installed). This plugin fills a need some of you have been asking for, considered adding it directly into Stallion, but it will work with any WordPress theme that uses wp_head() (that’s most WordPress themes) so made it stand alone (actually my first stand alone WordPress plugin).
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin was created to replace the so called WordPress SEO plugins currently available that damage a sites search engine optimization efforts. Any WordPress plugin that uses noindex and/or nofollow on your WordPress sites has the potential to damage your sites search engine rankings and should be avoided or at least used with extreme care.
The popular WordPress SEO plugins including the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin and the All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin use nofollow and noindex : Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin uses noindex and nofollow, All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin uses noindex.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Download
The SEO Plugin is hosted at the WordPress plugin repository at Download WordPress SEO Plugin.
Why you shouldn’t use WordPress SEO Plugins that use Nofollow
WordPress SEO plugins like the Yoast SEO Plugin 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).
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.
That’s straight from Google, nofollow deletes link benefit, DO NOT use NOFOLLOW.
Why you shouldn’t use WordPress SEO Plugins that use Noindex
Although noindex is not as SEO damaging as nofollow (doesn’t delete link benefit), noindex does waste link benefit. When a page is noindexed the link benefit that is flowing through that pages does NO SEO work on that noindexed page! All good SEO consultants know when link benefit flows through a page (via links) a proportion of that link benefit is used on that page (estimated 15% is used, it’s the dampening factor within the PageRank formula).
The perfect SEO setup is ALL pages on a site target one or more keywords (SERPs : Search Engine Results Pages) so ALL the link benefit flowing through the site generates traffic from search engines like Google through relevant SERPs. Few sites are perfect, we have Contact, About, Privacy, Disclaimer, Shopping Basket and other pages that though important to our visitors have little to no SEO value. Noindex can block these pages from being indexed, but noindex does not recycle the link benefit (the 15% that’s lost), there is little value in noindexing a page when the link benefit is wasted, OK the page isn’t indexed, but the link benefit is still used.
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin is Different
The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin doesn’t use nofollow or noindex, but can do the equivalent of noindex a set of pages whilst redirecting the link benefit (the 15%) back to the home page by using canonical URLs.
This is what the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin can do:
Equivalent of noindex login pages redirecting link benefit to home.
Equivalent of noindex admin pages redirecting link benefit to home.
Equivalent of noindex date archive pages redirecting link benefit to home.
Equivalent of noindex category archive pages redirecting link benefit to home.
Equivalent of noindex paged category archive pages (pages 2,3,4 etc…) redirecting link benefit to the first page in the category.
Equivalent of noindex tag archive pages redirecting link benefit to home.
Equivalent of noindex paged tag archive pages (pages 2,3,4 etc…) redirecting link benefit to the first page in the tag.
Equivalent of noindex search results pages redirecting link benefit to home.
Equivalent of noindex paged search results pages (pages 2,3,4 etc…) redirecting link benefit to the first page in the search result.
Equivalent of noindex paged home archive pages (pages 2,3,4 etc…) redirecting link benefit to the home page.
Equivalent of noindex single blog Posts and static Pages (Privacy, Disclaimer pages for example) redirecting link benefit to the home page (this feature needs a little code work).
By using the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin you can add monthly archives, categories, tags and paged home archives (4 types of archives) for your users AND recover link benefit (via canonical URLs) from the archives that have little to no SEO value: monthly archives (no SEO value), home paged archives (very little SEO value) and paged categories/paged tags (SEO wise you shouldn’t need both).
Who is the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Author?
My name is David Law, I fell into search engine optimization about a decade ago when I started an online business (selling adult toys and lingerie, awesome markup), but had no money to pay for traffic (had no money for anything!). Had to learn search engine optimization and within a year my site was receiving over 8,000 unique visitors a day mostly from Google organic search. I no longer sell adult products, saw the potential of SEO and became and SEO consultant (about 8-9 years ago). My own websites which I own/run mostly for fun and to give me sites to test SEO ideas on quickly, currently receive between 50,000 and 60,000 unique visitors a day with around 80% of the traffic coming through sites running WordPress.
Most of my time is spent as an SEO consultant working with medium size businesses, for around 6 years I’ve been developing WordPress SEO themes in my spare time, (Stallion 6 is by far the best WordPress SEO theme available) this is my first stand alone WordPress plugin (created a few little plugins to add to my themes).
David Law Google+
Website - WordPress SEO
61 responses to Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Errors
David, I recently moved a WP site from Texas to a cloud in London and a completely new host.
One of the things I noticed is that your SEO plugin is complaining. It’s installed with all your “highly recommended” settings…
Notice: Use of undefined constant st_seo_notindex_login – assumed ‘st_seo_notindex_login’ in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php on line 32 Notice: Use of undefined constant st_seo_notindex_admin – assumed ‘st_seo_notindex_admin’ in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php on line 33 Notice: Use of undefined constant st_seo_notindex_date – assumed ‘st_seo_notindex_date’ in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php on line 34 Notice: Use of undefined constant st_seo_notindex_author – assumed ‘st_seo_notindex_author’ in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php on line 35 Notice: Use of undefined constant st_seo_notindex_search – assumed ‘st_seo_notindex_search’ in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php on line 36 Notice: Use of undefined constant st_seo_notindex_tags – assumed ‘st_seo_notindex_tags’ in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php on line 37 Notice: Use of undefined constant st_seo_notindex_category – assumed ‘st_seo_notindex_category’ in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php on line 38 Notice: Use of undefined constant st_seo_notindex_home – assumed ‘st_seo_notindex_home’ in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php on line 39 Notice: has_cap was called with an argument that is deprecated since version 2.0! Usage of user levels by plugins and themes is deprecated. Use roles and capabilities instead. in /opt/standingcloud/application/wordpress_10777/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3466
I wondered if you might know what’s going on here and how to fix it?
Terence.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Notice: Use of Undefined Constant
Those are notices not errors per se, I’m aware of these.
Basically the notices are saying this isn’t the most up to date way of achieving something, but it still works. It’s on a list of things to fix when I learn how (I’m not a PHP programmer, I worked on the Stallion plugin tried to remove them).
To see these notices (normally hidden) you are probably using the plugin by Andrew Nacin “Log Deprecated Notices” or similar and/or have WP_DEBUG set to true in your wp-config.php file.
If you have this code in your wp-config.php file
define('WP_DEBUG', true);The notices and any notices/errors caused by other plugins/themes may show on the site itself (your visitors see them!).
Normally you wouldn’t run a live site with a WP_DEBUG set to true as there’s loads of themes and plugins that throw out depreciated code notices etc… that are not errors and don’t break the theme/plugin.
On a live site wp-config.php file would ideally be set to false:
define('WP_DEBUG', false);The undefined constant notices generated by the Stallion SEO Plugin are related to constants that haven’t been declared before they are called (something like that).
If you want to keep an eye on what themes/plugins are doing behind the scenes without having notices posted all over your site use the Log Deprecated Notices plugin, the notices are added to a log you can view under the WordPress Dashboard without it messing up your live site. This assumes you don’t have a development site, I use a development site for testing themes/plugins etc… so no need to run this plugin on a live site.
Since you just moved hosts could be having show notices/errors in your php.ini file showing these types of notices. If it’s not the wp_debug resulting in notices showing I would guess you have something like this in your php.ini file:
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICEdisplay_errors = On
As I understand showing errors and notices on a live site is a potential security issue, hackers can check for various exploits on your site and if you have errors/notices shown they get an insight into how to hack your site!
PHP security not my area of expertise, but I would strongly advise turning showing errors and notices off and have them logged so only you see them.
Changing
display_errors = Onto
display_errors = OffWill hide all errors and notices at browser level, if you have log_errors = On set you’ll have them logged to a file so you can still check them.
David
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Code Fix for Notice: Use of Undefined Constant
Well that was easy to fix the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin notices, just needed some ” around the constants.
Will be adding a Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin update, but first will see if there’s any interesting features I could add to the plugin first. The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin update will be version 1.1 so when that’s released no need to make this change:
If you want to fix yourself edit the file stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php and change:
add_action('admin_menu', 'stallion_seo_plugin');add_action('login_head', 'st_seo_notindex_login');
add_action('admin_head', 'st_seo_notindex_admin');
add_action('wp_head', 'st_seo_notindex');
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');
To
add_action('admin_menu', 'stallion_seo_plugin');add_action('login_head', 'st_seo_notindex_login');
add_action('admin_head', 'st_seo_notindex_admin');
add_action('wp_head', 'st_seo_notindex');
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');
This adds no new features, all it does is remove the “Notice: Use of Undefined Constant” messages if you have wp_debug set to true or you use a plugin that lists depreciated code etc… If you don’t see these notices no need to make this change, just wait for the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin 1.1 update which I’ll upload to the WordPress plugin repository within the week.
Lets see if I can find some interesting features to add to make an update worthwhile.
David
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
You're right and you're wrong
Just having moved host I picked up in the logs, which I had temporarily switched on, that these (shall we call them anomalies) were present.
Also not being a programmer, I thought the best thing to do was to report them to you. Actually, when I switched off the error logging a little while later, I did just switch on GD Press Tools debugging for a while, just in case it picked up anything else.
This is what it reported…
Deprecated Argument:
On line: 42, In file: wp-content/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin.php
That’s it. Nothing more.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Five star plugin - Tags
I do not know why everyone one this site goes to WordPress plugins and rate this five stars? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stallion-wordpress-seo-plugin/
I am fairly sure the negatives were by competition not like hearing the truth. It is a simple and beautifully written plugin.
Are tags 2006? I am trying to elimate tagging all together and just use categories. Why? Panda (something that is irritating some of my websites) does not like thin content pages, like tag pages that have one or two posts. I have scores of these and maybe I have a site wide Panda thumbs down?
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin Star Rating
It is a little strange it’s had 5 Broken Reports (4 works) with no forum topics to indicate why it was marked broken, especially with under 5,000 downloads. Most plugins need hundreds of thousands of downloads to achieve any sort of rating because most users don’t rate either way. For example the All in One SEO Pack Plugin has over 8,000,000 downloads and only 39 users have bothered to say if it works/broken.
Currently the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin only does one thing, adds canonical URLs to the head on archive pages and admin pages, not sure how it could be broken.
Shame plugin authors can’t get an indication of who marked a plugin broken. For example I marked the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin as 1 star, but didn’t mark it broken (didn’t click works either): although the Yoast SEO plugin can damage a sites SEO it works as the author intended. Did the same with the All In One SEO Plugin.
If it is others WordPress SEO Plugin authors I’m not going to lower myself to marking their plugins broken and hope no one else would do that either.
I have been surprised at the negative response to the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin, seems SEO dogma has set in despite the overwhelming evidence nofollow and noindex are SEO damaging. What makes me most sad is when a user starts from the perspective I’m wrong about nofollow, does the research and discovers I’m right, but still sticks to using these damaging WordPress SEO plugins! If WordPress users want to damage their sites SEO, not a lot I can do about it
David
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Just ignore the idiots. By the way, I'm one of them.
David,
The reason I continue to use both yours AND Joost’s plugin, is that the combination offers so much more than either alone. The other reason, of course, is that I don’t install plugins where there information page gives the warning that they haven’t been tested with the version of WP I am using. And many are not kept up to date.
I have tried as assiduously as I can (not being a programmer) to switch off all the no-indexing and no-follow functionality in Yoast WordPress SEO, and relied almost entirely on Stallion WordPress SEO for defining crawler access on my site. Currently the only thing that is nofollowed on my home page is my name as the author.
However, the advantage that Joost has is that he has included a number of things which people want in an SEO plugin (although not all of them), and if Stallion WordPress SEO had the following, like many others, no doubt, I would be able and want to use just one.
By the way, I am not looking to get into a discussion, heated or otherwise, about what is right and what is wrong, and I do understand that you always want to do it right, but I am just stating what I think people want. i.e. what draws the crowds. How you give it to them; that’s another issue.
– MOST IMPORTANT: On-page analysis of each post or page to ensure the correct use and formation of keywords, images, slugs, content minimums, outbound links, page title, keyword phrase positioning, Flesch Reading Ease score, keyword phrase usage in text, headings and URL, keyword density and use in meta data.
– The ability to craft titles, snippets and meta information for their pages and posts so that they can control what shows up in the SERPs.
– The ability to inject items like OpenGraph, Dublin Core and Geo-tagging taxonomies and meta data without needing yet another plugin.
– XML sitemap creation according to the schema created by setting up the SEO plugin’s crawler access limitations and directions.
– Permalink manipulation, like stripping the category.
– Breadcrumbs which not only provide secondary navigation but also aid the crawlers to find everything you want them to find.
– RSS feed manipulation to include specific keywords and links on each page.
– Importing the settings (only the correct ones of course) from any previously used SEO plugin.
– It should also flush and update the W3 Total Cache Page Cache each time you alter anything important.
Now I am sure other people will have additions or deletions of their own, but if I had all this PLUS the features of the current Stallion WordPress SEO plugin, I for one would be very happy and only need one plugin.
Guess which one!
Terence.
P.S. This kind of all-in-one plugin is intended for people who don’t have your theme and maybe never will, i.e the majority, for whatever reason. Their themes (poorly SEO’d or not, in comparison with your Stallion theme), you can do something about fixing. To accomplish this you will need to forget how your Stallion Theme has everything right, nothing wrong and beats everything else hands-down. Many folk don’t have the skills or the money to start from scratch and just have to improve, the best way they can, what’ they’ve already got. Your choice, of course, but why not do something amazing to help them?
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
what are your thoughts on SEO pressor?
I don’t know how I stumbled onto your site, but you obviously know your stuff!
You may have reviewed the good & bad of SEO Pressor & I missed it, but what are your thoughts on this one? I like how it gives you a “progress bar” if you will, on how the on-page SEO looks.
I’m not sure if it does any of the nofollow/noidex you talk about. Plus, if I buy your Stallion theme, do I need the SEO “progress bar” I mentioned?
Thank you for your help!
Ann
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
May probably buy this theme to some site – I really do believe it´s very good – but now I search for a SEO-theme which also are beautiful – out of the box.
The presentation is important here.
Wouldn´t it be nice to have both qualities in the same theme David…?
If you have some advice on this it would be appreciated.
Regards!
Mike
Beautiful WordPress Themes vs Functionality
Beauty is subjective and adding appealing colour schemes to Stallion is currently top of the list of future updates.
SEO is covered, sure I’ll find the odd small SEO improvement (like the new search code I added in Stallion 6.2), but Stallion is already years ahead of it’s closest competitors SEO wise.
Ad features wise it’s one of the best WordPress ad themes available, I’m sure I’ll find improvements ad wise in the future that will eventually make Stallion the best WordPress ad theme by far as well, but it’s not a high priority.
Which means it’s all about aesthetics now.
There are 27 Stallion theme colour schemes in Stallion 6.2 (3 new ones), you can test the colour schemes out on this site on the right menu. Two of the three new ones (Delicate and Coraline) are based on the WordPress themes Delicate and Coraline which are currently two of the most popular WordPress themes (themes listed by popularity at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/browse/popular/) in the WordPress Theme repository.
So I’m adding new Stallion colour schemes based on what others use, the benefit of adding colour schemes this way is they are to some degree modular. The Coraline and Delicate themes for example do not include the header image code TwentyEleven has, Stallion does. So you can have a site that looks like Delicate with the TwentyEleven header image code. You get Delicate/Coraline with all the Stallion features making Stallion Coraline and Stallion Delicate better than Delicate/Coraline.
If anyone has any suggestions for new theme colours or features, feel free to suggest them, preferably as a comment under Stallion WordPress Theme Feature Requests as I browse through those comments for ideas when working on an update.
Stallion is sold through Clickbank which has a 60 day money back guarantee, you don’t need a real reason for obtaining a refund from Clickbank (it’s an automated process, request a refund from Clickbank a few days later a refund is issued with no input from the product seller), so try Stallion out for up to 60 days and if it’s not for you get a full refund.
David
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Nice plugin
Nice plugin,
I am using this plugin for all of my sites.. I think its help me to get good SERP….
thanks for the developers
Saran
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin is needed after Stallion 7.0?
I see a major feature of Stallion 7.0 is integrating the ‘All in One’ SEO pack. However, does this integration eliminate the need for the ‘Stallion WordPress SEO plugin’, or is the Stallion WordPress SEO plugin now more for people not using your theme?
Regarding the Stallion WP SEO plugin installation – What I did was:
1) under SEO Advanced options ‘turned Stallion All in One SEO on
2) went to ‘Stallion All in One SEO Built In Plugin Options’ and updated the database (it went to a blank screen and I freaked out for a second) – hit the back button and everything seems fine.
3) I enabled the plugin/ choose the default settings.
Everything looks good to go and agreed it is a major improvement on the orignal plugin.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Stallion All In One SEO Plugin vs Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
The Built In Stallion All In One SEO Plugin isn’t the same as the stand alone Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin (confusing I know
).
The stand alone Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin does one thing, adds canonical URLs to archives etc… you want on the site (so visitors can visit them), but you don’t want search engines to indexed (dated archives for example), but do want the SEO benefit to be recycled (canonical URLs are like 301 redirects without the browser redirect).
The Built In Stallion All In One SEO Plugin currently doesn’t cover the above feature. I’ll probably incorporate the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin canonical feature into the Stallion Theme in the next update.
The Built In Stallion All In One SEO Plugin is based on the popular All In One SEO Pack Plugin and includes the SEO damaging noindex features (with warnings) that the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin was created to replace.
If I wasn’t trying to keep legacy support for All In One SEO Pack Plugin users (the original All In One SEO data works with Stallion) I’d have removed the noindex options and replaced them with the canonical options.
If I could click my fingers and combine the features I’d have the canonical URLs options added to the Built In Stallion All In One SEO Plugin options page so both versions are available. Going to be fun mashing that code together
If you’ve been playing around with stallion 7.0 you’ll see there’s a lot of new toys to play with, takes a LOT of effort to get the code to work together under most scenarios. I thoroughly tested the new code, but can’t account for every server setup, I’ve not experienced the blank screen after activating the built In Stallion All In One SEO code.
The original All In One SEO code was awful, if it wasn’t for the user base (most used WordPress plugin) I’d have not used it as a base for Stallion. Took a LOT of time to remove PHP warnings and notices and to understand why some of the code existed, had some weird stuff going on like having to save settings after activation even though it didn’t do anything. Seemed like the developer was forcing it’s users to the plugins option page so they had to see all the ads etc… (I removed all the ads from my code).
David
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
My current list of plugins I use with Stallion
The first thing a new WP user does is load up on a lot of plugins. I know I did. I use to (years ago) spend hours plugging and unplugging WP add ons when I first started, to try to find the edge.
Most are not SEOed well and some made my site sluggish and a few had errors and other become obsolete with new WP versions. Using Stallion I cut my list to a smaller universe. My theory is always try to work within a theme, with as little modifications as possible as less change of conflict.
Akismet
Contextual Related Posts SEO Version (for me one of the most important plugins)
Google XML Sitemaps (some would argue not needed)
Jetpack Lite (replaces WP Stats without having to install a much larger Jetpack (ironic name)
Most Popular Posts (useful widget)
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin (see above)
WP-DBManager (backups, cleaning old tables left from trying too many plugins)
WP-Super Cache (faster site)
WP-Polls (not needed but fun on the right site)
Stallion 7.0 has worked well so far so good. Lots of options to toy with and experiment, will be playing with these like a new computer game.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
WordPress SEO Plugins List
With WordPress plugins you have to be careful they aren’t resource hogs, I’ve had plugins with great features add hundreds extra of database queries to a page! The original contextual related posts plugin is like that on archive pages (where it shouldn’t even be loaded), in my version it’s fixed.
I plan to update the Stallion Contextual Related Posts Plugin and incorporate the new random thumbnails feature into it, basically rather than have the blinking cartoon a random thumbnail is used. Will also link it in with the Stallion All In One SEO Plugin code so it uses the keyword phrases etc… I might try to incorporate the plugin directly into Stallion so no need to install a stand alone plugin.
I’m dropping using the Most Popular Posts Plugin because the Stallion SEO Posts widget does the same thing, but MUCH better.
I’ve got the Stallion SEO Posts widget running on the right sidebar menu item “Stallion Popular Articles”. Popular posts organised by comment count with thumbnails and excerpt, plus incorporated into the Stallion All In One SEO code (keyword phrases etc…).
The Stallion SEO Posts widget is awesome, I’m using it twice on this site the popular articles widget and in the first footer widget area the “Latest Stallion Articles”.
Can also create recently modified, alphabetical, random and by ID with the option to reverse the order.
If you look at most widgets you are lucky to have the option to enable the widget for either one category or exclude from one category, there’s no easy to use (AKA dropdown menu or tick boxes) WordPress default way to select multiple categories to enable/exclude a widget. Took ages to track down code that would work, but I found some and this is a highly unique feature rich widget.
I expect I’ll average three menu items per site for the Stallion SEO Posts widget when I get the time to update all my sites, it really adds a lot of colour via images to the sidebars. In future updates I’ll add more random thumbnail sets as well, so for those who don’t add featured images to posts there will be more thumbnail choices.
In the next Stallion update I plan to add title element (title tag) support for the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin, although I don’t use it or recommend it’s use, some Stallion theme users do use it, so makes sense to use the Yoast WordPress SEO plugins title tags for anchor text etc…. when available.
David
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
SEO post tip - where to time the custom images - set permission to 777
Of course what am I thinking, using the most popular post plugin is like I am living back in 2009 or something (remember alinks).
Your SEO Posts is eons better. Not just saying that. However, to modify the widget so you get custom icons for the posts you need to:
go to -> /wp-content/themes/stallion-seo-theme/thumbnails/
There are size 100 and 200 image folders for custom images.
On another note(not related to popular posts), to use the Auto thumbnails or featured slide show you need to know HOW to set /cache/ permission for folder to be 777.
You need to go: -> in your FTP to the folder /cache/ and right-click and under properties you can do this.
Seems obvious if you know what all this is about, but for new people it might sound scary.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Stallion Theme v7.0 Tutorials
I’ve not wrote the new tutorials yet, have added so many new features will be writing tutorials for months!!!
The random thumbnail feature is similar to the random banner image feature, only difference is there’s two sets of images 100px by 100px and 200px by 200px. The 100px images are used by widgets and the 200px images used for thumbnails within archives. Both versions are hooked into Timthumb.php so bandwith usage is minimized, which is why the Stallion cache folder (/wp-content/themes/stallion-seo-theme/cache/) is so important to have the correct permissions set otherwise Timthumb can’t create the smaller thumbnails.
With regards permissions 777 is a potential security issue, always start with the minimum permissions needed and work your way up, on some servers 755 is enough, others 775 and what should work (as last resort) with all 777.
I have sites on the same server where 755 works and others 775 (never needed 777), probably a case of building the sites on different servers years ago and some settings being inherited as I used a backup to move a domain from an old server to a new server.
David
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Double up on terms in SEO Posts widget - questions - Does chaos equal stickiness
If you go to a ‘search engine spider’ view and look at Stallion SEO posts, you will notice that the Stallion SEO post will use a ‘alt tag’ that is the name of the post title unless set to something else (who has all the time in the world to reset everything
).
My question is will this double repeating of keywords be a negative? Would it be better to have either a ‘link title’ or a ‘alt tag’ but not both next to each other?
Too bad there is no way to have a synonym database that would mix keywords up so it they are not over used.
Also I have just deployed two SEO Stallion posts widgets on my main blog with like 10 posts on each. I hope it does not dilute the landing page post focus with too many sidebar items, I like widgets as it gives people more chances to click and stay on site.
Widgets everyhere with images, in some ways it is more chaotic but I have a feeling a little chaos is good as people click visually around as long as they ultimately get what they want.
I believe website ‘stickiness’ is the ultimate SEO factor.
I had a zero widget site and it did not do well.
About the tutorials you can not do everything all the time, hats off to you. I wish the onsite search box would function more intelligently as many of the questions have been asked before.
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
SEO Alt Text vs SEO Anchor Text
Alt text and anchor text are both important SEO wise, so ideally all non-layout images (you shouldn’t add alt text to layout images) should have relevant alt text and all text links should have relevant anchor text. The title attribute content of text links (title=”post title here”) is ignored by Google, so doesn’t matter what is used there.
The Stallion SEO Posts widget has the option to use a combination of images and text links, but you don’t have to use both at the same time (I will though).
The widget is also linked into the Stallion All In One SEO Plugin so you don’t have to use identical alt and anchor text, it’s why I added the ability to have different alt and anchor text so it can be different.
That being said if you haven’t got around to adding keyword phrases for the posts or you don’t want to it’s not going to cause SEO damage per se having an identical image and text link next to one another.
The biggest SEO issue for all non-main content (content within sidebars etc…) is the SEO impact on the main content. In a perfect world ALL non-main content should support the main content SEO wise, so if the main content is about Swimming with Dolphins, ideally the non-main content would be related to swimming or with dolphins or something similar. Few sites are that highly niched so what you add will have a negative impact on the main content SERPs of some posts more than others. That leads to not adding unrelated content to sidebars etc… but if you don’t add unrelated non-main content on many sites some posts wouldn’t be linked to, so it’s a balance between the main content of a page and the links etc… to other pages.
Would be great to have a search feature that could search and link directly to comments, I’ve looked for relevant plugins, but closest I found would search the comments text as well, but still linked to the top of the post. Pretty much useless for sites with a lot of comments, is there much to gain knowing one of the 50 comments uses a phrase if the search result doesn’t link directly to the comment.
And yes I’m hoping chaos could equal more stickiness, time will tell if having a lot more images will result in visitors visiting more posts on a site.
David
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Why can't we use nofollow??
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
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Nofollow DELETES Link Benefit
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 http://www.seo-gold.com/seo-gold-goes-wordpress.html (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
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
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