Archives for the SEO category

March 15, 2008

Meta Robots WordPress plugin

There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.

DownloadThis plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to:

  • Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
  • Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
  • Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
  • Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions.
  • Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
  • Disable author and date-based archives.Box on posts and pages to change the robots meta tag.
  • nofollow (nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index) the category listings on single posts and pages to prevent PageRank leakage.
  • Nofollow outbound links on your frontpage.
  • Nofollow tag links.
  • Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess from within your WordPress.
  • Add robots meta tags to individual posts and pages.
  • Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
  • In WordPress 2.3 and up:
    • Prevent indexing of just your comment feeds.
    • Enforce a trailing slash on archive and tag pages.

Installation is easy:

  • Download the plugin from WordPress.org.
  • Copy it to the plugins directory of your blog.
  • Enable the plugin in your admin panel.
  • An options panel will appear under Plugins.
  • Choose the settings you want.

FAQ

  • I set the plugin to nofollow my category listings, and it still shows them without nofollow, what am I doing wrong?
    You should check whether your theme uses wp_list_categories and wp_get_archives, as opposed to the deprecated list_cats, wp_list_cats or get_archives.
  • I’ve activated the plugin and set it to add a NOODP tag, but no robots meta tag shows in my source.
    You should check whether your theme has a wp_head() call in the header, and add it if it doesn’t.

Support
If you like this plugin and want to support me, check out my donations and support page!

Versions
2.9.1 Fixed a bug with noindexing of the homepage’s subpages.
2.9 Fixed some bugs and added the option to redirect links to search pages.
2.8 The plugin now plays nice with the is_frontpage plugin.
2.7 Added verification for MSN Webmaster Portal.
2.2 Added verification for Yahoo! Site Explorer.
2.1 Added verification for Google Webmaster Tools.
2.0 Added a Robots Meta box to posts and pages, allowing you to choose a specific robots meta tag for each post and page.
1.5 Added the possibility to edit your robots.txt and .htaccess files from the Robots Meta plugin page, and the option to noindex subpages to your homepage.
1.4 Added the possibility to nofollow your category links on on posts and pages, for better silo-ing.
1.2 Added possibility to disable date and author archives, enforcing of trailing slash for WordPress 2.3.
1.1 Added noindex possibility for login, register and admin pages.
1.0 Original version.

Translations
This plugin has been translated into:

Landing sites Wordpress Plugin

When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, it shows them related posts to their search on your blog.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

More information what XML-Sitemaps are and how they can help you to get indexed by the major search engines can be found at Sitemaps.org and the searchenginewatch blog.

If you have questions about XML-Sitemaps or run into problems, have a look at my Sitemaps FAQ.

Note: The XML-Sitemap format was introduced in 2005 by Google and adopted in 2006 by YAHOO, MSN Search and Ask.com so thats why it’s often called “Google Sitemaps”.

Extended Comment Options WordPress Plugin

One feature which is conspicuously absent from WordPress is the ability to switch comments on or off for all posts. Under the Options > Discussion page, you can switch the default setting for comments on or off, but that only applies to posts you make from that point forward.

You can disable comments on individual posts, but if you’ve got more than twenty posts, this takes ages! This plugin allows you to quickly and easily switch comments (and trackbacks/pingbacks) on or off with a single click.

Extended Comment Options 2.0 has been tested on WordPress version 2.3.2. Support for versions below this cannot be guaranteed. Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress is always recommended. If version 2.0 does not work, you can always try previous versions, though these do not have all of the features of 2.0 (the links are below).