[wp-hackers] Best SEO plugin?

[David Law]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2010 22:51:59 -0500, you wrote:

>On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Law <
>wp-hackers at google-adsense-templates.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>> You are missing the point, from an SEO perspective we don't want ANY
>> nofollow links as they delete PR/link benefit (see earlier in the
>> thread), but from a user perspective we still want the option to link
>> in comments.
>>
>> So switch nofollow with another way to link out without passing link
>> benefit and damaging a sites SEO and you have a solution. My solution
>> is to use forms for author links (see comments on my site in the sig,
>> that site has no nofollow links and doesn't link out with text links
>> as the author comment links are forms).
>>
>
>This seems pretty shady to many and I would hate to see core do this.  I
>would rather see core provide quality semantic code (you know, like only
>using forms when you have, I don't know, a form), then play some SEO game.
> the hooks are in place that if you want to modify the content of the output
>of your comments, you are more then welcome.  If there is a need for
>additional hooks, I fully support adding those.

Although using forms to serve author URLs isn't shady, I wasn't
suggesting using forms this way in core WordPress, mainly because it
would probably break (mess up the formatting) of every theme available
today. I was pointing out there is at least one solution, so others
who like me understand SEO and want the most from WordPress have a
solution at theme level.

For those interested in using forms to stop comment author URLs
passing link benefit without using the nofollow attribute, it's not
blackhat SEO, because you are not trying to game the search engines**.
Google wants webmasters to NOT pass link benefit to sites they are not
reccomending. That was the whole point of the introduction of nofollow
in the first place, unfortunatly Google moved the goal posts on
nofollow presumably because there are those that abuse nofollow by
attempting to sculpt PR by nofollowing internal pages (contact, about
etc...). It could be argued those who use nofollow to sculpt PR for
example those who use plugins like All in One SEO are being pennalised
by Google, they are loosing a LOT of link benefit.

** I have about 70 WordPress installations running a theme with the
author URLs as forms (most of my traffic is from Google, currently at
around 40,000 unique visitors a day). I have hundreds of customers
running the same theme and I've never had a report of a customer
having worse search engine rankings after using the theme. I'll add I
tested the concept on my own sites for over 6 months before adding the
code to the theme I send to customers.

Anyway, as it is I'm happy to know WordPress development are aware of
the damaging aspects of nofollow and hopefully they'll try to limit
it's use in the future. I know it's a difficult problem to solve, if
it was easy I wouldn't be using forms to solve the issue :-)

David
-- 
Monetize your WordPress blog with Search Engine Optimized templates
including AdSense ads http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/


>http://aaron.jorb.in
>twitter: twitter.com/aaronjorbin
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