[wp-hackers] Best SEO plugin?

[AdSense Templates]

On Mon, 1 Nov 2010 03:40:22 +0200, you wrote:

>Did you try Yoast's new SEO plugin <http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/> ?
>
>I don't really use any SEO plugin, as I like to do all the SEO directly from
>the theme.

Like you I do the vast majority of my SEO at theme level, you can't
SEO a WordPress blog without getting under the bonnet of the theme you
are using, I'd say 90% plus of SEO can be achieved at theme level and
very little at plugin level (plugins add fluff).

I make my living as an SEO consultant and have looked at most of the
so called SEO plugins and they are rubbish, I use none of them, what
is it with them still concentrating on meta tags in 2010!

Anyway, had a look at the plugin above and it doesn't add anything
truely worthwhile. It's not an SEO plugin IMO.

When it comes to WordPress the current major issue is with all the
nofollow links WordPress generates, you can easily waste over half
your link benefit just through nofollow links!! Through a use of theme
editing, editing a core WordPress file (fortunatly just one), one
plugin (not an SEO plugin) and removing full HTML links from the body
of comments (the only manual input from me) I've managed to remove all
nofollow links from my WordPress sites. Note: a well commented site
can have hundreds if not thousands of nofollow links, I have a popular
jokes site with almost 18,000 comments that if I used default
WordPress with a standard theme would have at least 18,000 nofollow
links!!!!

If any of the WordPress development team read this PLEASE try to
remove the nofollow links from WordPress, they are really damaging
your users SEO efforts!

I've tried to get a paticular issue fixed (very easy to fix BTW, takes
me two minutes to add the fix to new versions of WordPress before I
upgrade) regarding nofollow and the Reply to comment links, (one of
these nofollow links added to every comment if you turn threaded
comments on) but so far no joy!

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10550
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/287704?replies=1
http://codex.wordpress.org/Talk:Template_Tags/comment_reply_link

This is a massive SEO issue with WordPress, if you want to understand
the problem and see some partial solutions see
http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wp-content/themes/talian-adsense-clickbank-seo-05/readme/08-nofollow-problems.txt

Would be great for WordPress to take this nofollow issue seriously and
come up with another way to link out to sites without passing link
benefit or using a nofollow attribute (whilst having the option to
link out with passing SEO benefit as well).

In the theme I use I converted author links to form buttons which
Google etc... don't treat as links (don't pass any SEO value), but
browsers treat just like links (so you can still give your commenters
links without damaging your sites SEO). Since I don't want to waste
link benefit on the login links changed those to form button links as
well. Got hundreds of customers running this code and so far no issues
reported.

David
-- 
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