IMPORTANT: Correcting my advice about SEO plugins for Wordpress

[Michael Martinez]

Last week I stepped out on a limb and wrote a rant against Wordpress plugins like the All In One plugin. You can read it here: All In One SEO Plug-in Hurting Websites.

So, I was suffering from an allergy attack and didn't feel well and that's usually when I get up on my soapbox and shoot my mouth off.

If you read the comments, you'll see that someone took me to task for claiming (or implying) that the plugin embeds nofollow in some places.

He was right, I was wrong. "All In One" SEO plugin does NOT embed nofollow on links or pages. It DOES embed noindex on tag and category pages.

When I've analyzed blogs that use nofollow on internal links, I've blamed the plugin. It appears now that I should have been blaming the theme. For instance, at Visible Technologies we use the Thesis theme for our SEO blogs. We like the theme but it does have options for embedding nofollow on internal links. We disabled those options.

You'll also see that I ran down the options available on our version of "All In One" (it has not been upgraded to the latest version) and gave my opinion on the SEO value of those options.

This plugin -- in my opinion -- does not add any significant value to a Website's search optimization. But neither is it embedding "rel='nofollow'" or nofollow in robots meta tags.

The most important issue that I should be addressing, and which I will make clear going forward, is that people NOT use "rel='nofollow'" on their internal links and they NOT use nofollow in their robots meta tags.

Nor should you use Javascript or in any way attempt to hide your internal navigation links from search engines.

You should not be attempting to sculpt PageRank, which is where all this brouhaha over internalized nofollow came from.

Why did I mistake what the Thesis (and probably other themes) did with nofollow for a plugin's behavior? Because so many people use them together, including us. Our Web design team decided to experiment with the plugin without consulting me. I left it in place at first but eventually asked that it be deactivated when I found that our tag and category pages had been dropped from the search indices.

We also disabled internal nofollows when I learned those had been activated, and then I forgot about everything for a few months.

Late last year I began running into numerous Websites -- all built using Wordpress -- that were using the "All In One" plugin AND they were nofollowing navigation links. All of those sites were having issues with Google (and to a lesser extent Bing). They were losing visibility due to attempts at sculpting PageRank (and in some cases other issues as well).

I have told many people here on PAL both publicly and privately that the plugin was nofollowing their links. I was wrong. I apologize to you all for confusing a plugin with one or more themes.

I still like the Thesis theme. I just don't like nofollow on internal navigation. It makes no sense from an SEO point of view (Google has actively asked people to stop trying to sculpt PageRank -- it DOES hurt their Websites).

I still don't like SEO plugins. They no longer add value to Wordpress from a search optimization perspective because Wordpress now lets you create custom page titles, URLs, and meta descriptions. Furthermore, other people have reported issues with "All In One" and other SEO plugins that I have not raised (and hopefully they have done better fact-checking than I did last week).

If you don't know enough about search engine optimization to do it yourself, the last thing you want to do is turn that task over to software whose default behaviors you cannot evaluate.

There are some good tutorials out there that help people learn the basics of search engine optimization. I recommend these often:

Google's SEO Starter Guide

Bing Webmaster Features

Bing SEO Guide

Bing SEO and SEM Tips

[sirtiner]

I also don't recommend any seo plugins, Like you said, most thing you can do standard, other you can fix easly.

Don't trust a random person to do your "seo"