Comment on Talian 5 WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

AdSense WordPress Theme Options The current users of Talian with SEO/AdSense version 03 will have noticed I’ve changed the Talian theme on this site quite a bit over the last few days (been testing the changes here).

Not quite finished the updates yet, need to clean up the code a bit, but almost got all the features I want.

Biggest change is a complete rewrite of the commenting code. Since WordPress 2.7 came out I’ve been wanting to add the paginated commenting and the ability to respond to specific comments in a threaded format (activated on this site now). You can see what this looks like on this page. I currently have it set to show 30 comments per page. There is a problem with activating this in WordPress 2.7 to 2.8.3 which I’ll explain in a reply to this comment to show the Reply to feature :)

You will notice my comments are highlighted with an orange dashed border. When the admin posts it now gets highlighted. Considered putting a different background colour, but having three background colours was confusing.

Have edited the css significantly, for example have removed all the font-size=Xpx which is not very good for usability, switched to em. Fixed various css issues with headers (H1 to H6), original Talian had left floated them for no obvious reason, floats removed now.

Increased the width of the Talian theme (now 1,000 px) to allow for the use of the 336×280 AdSense ad unit within the posts content. Gives us a little more space to play with.

Added a random image selector for the banner like image near the top of a post, so far made 6 new images that are randomly selected (refresh the page to see it change). Very easy to add more or switch to less images. I got the idea from the Cutline theme an SEO/AdSense version of which I sell as well.

Removed the Translation links from the menu: unfortunately Google has changed the way it treats nofollow links and since we don’t want to send 7 links to Google translator site I had them as nofollow links. Nofollow links now destroy PR/link benefit (for the Google search engine) so should be avoided at all costs now!!

Removed all nofollow links I could from the theme. Login links are now created by using a form button, since Google doesn’t follow form buttons of the type I used they won’t treat them as links. This will protect a lot of lost link benefit.

I also removed the RSS comment links from specific post, for two reasons. 1. I had them as nofollow links before Google made the nofollow changes, so I had to remove the nofollow. 2. If we allowed Google to index this links we’d be wasting a lot of link benefit for little gain. I don’t know of many people of follow comments on specific post and there’s always the main RSS comments feed which shows all recent comments.

Speaking of which I removed nofollow from the main RSS links (comment and posts feeds). There’s a small risk of SERPs damage doing this, so if you notice your comments feeds ranking better than your main posts let me know (happened to me once a while back).

Have reinstated the ability for our blog readers to add their URL to a comment, but have replaced the author link with a form button link (as described above). This means our commenter’s can have a clickable link, but we don’t loose link benefit. Default WordPress themes use nofollow on comment links, so the PR/link benefit associated with comment links is lost!! You can see these links in action on this comment, my link is a form link.

Still got a fair amount to do, so not sure when I’ll release this. Because I’ve made so many changes I’m going to consider this version 04, don’t worry though will be sending it out free to all version 03 customers. When I finally get this finished ideally you’d install it from scratch as a new theme and rebuild your widgets menu since I’ve renamed the widgets to make it easier to setup a blog wit SEO/AdSense in mind (easier to copy what I do).

David Law