WordPress SEO Plugin Testing
I’ve never used the Yoast plugin on a live production site, it doesn’t provide the post Panda/Penguin and 2014 Hummingbird level of WordPress SEO I expect for a site, the Stallion Responsive Theme is better, the SEO tutorials and reviews are based on testing on a Localhost server (development site).
Testing plugins and themes on development sites can result in issues not seen with live sites and vice a versa, that being said I’ve looked through Joost de Valk’s plugin code (Joost is the main developer of the Yoast plugin and other WordPress plugins and some Genesis child themes) and he clearly knows his stuff when it comes to PHP coding and WordPress plugin development (awesome code).
Yoast WordPress SEO Tutorial Review
I’ll try to be fair with the plugin review and Yoast WordPress SEO tutorial information (I’ll be referring to the Yoast SEO Tutorial information at times), but I’m going to tend towards the SEO damaging parts of the plugin (noindex and nofollow for example) and the Yoast SEO tutorial rather than a general plugin review/SEO tutorial.
With how much detail I’m going to go into, the last thing you want is details like the plugin activated with no errors or I run a plugin called Blackbox that lists depreciated WordPress code and PHP errors and PHP notices and Yoast SEO didn’t generate any issues.
There’s loads of Yoast SEO plugin tutorials (how the plugin does XYZ) and “we love WordPress SEO by Yoast reviews” sort of fluff in Google, so if you don’t agree with how I view the state of Hummingbird WordPress SEO in 2014 feel free to find another review/tutorial.
I’m generally going to go through the plugin one options page at a time and discuss in detail SEO problems and search engine optimization theories as we go along (I can write about SEO for hours :-)). And that brings us to the first Yoast WordPress SEO Tutorial regarding WordPress Paged Comments.
For my test site I’m using the default WordPress theme Twenty Fourteen.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Review
Yoast WordPress SEO Paging Comments is Enabled
In this section I discuss the SEO value of WordPress Paged comments, on the Yoast WordPress SEO General Settings page there’s a big red warning message about using paged comments.
As you’ll read this advice isn’t best SEO practices 2014 and might damage your sites Google rankings (especially mobile search traffic) and damage the user experience. You might find reading my WordPress Duplicate Content SEO Tutorial which touches on paginated comments.
Yoast WordPress SEO Title Tags Tutorial
Why do we call them title tags when they are title elements? In this part of the Yoast review I dissect the plugins title tags output and the advice about (in)correct title tag usage within the Yoast SEO tutorial.
The Yoast SEO plugin default title tags output isn’t best practices 2014, the plugins defaults are OK for a branded domain (like wordpress.org) but not ideal for a website that’s not brand targeting and wants to get maximum SEO from the title elements.
Yoast WordPress SEO Noindex Meta Tag
The noindex robots meta tag when used incorrectly can damage a WordPress sites search engine marketing work.
Webmasters spend countless hours generating backlinks that send valuable link benefit (PageRank/PR) to their sites only to have it wasted on category and other archive sections of a site WordPress SEO plugins prevent from being indexed by Google! Yoast WordPress SEO adds “noindex, follow” robots meta tags or even worse “noindex, nofollow” robots meta tags in a failed attempt to sculpt PageRank: unfortunately the noindex robots meta tag doesn’t sculpt PageRank, it wastes it and when associated with the nofollow option deletes PageRank!. Read the noindex SEO tutorial to discover why.
Thank You For David Law