If you are a user of the Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme do NOT install the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin discussed below. Stallion Responsive includes a far more SEO advanced version of the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin that’s fully integrated with other theme package features (for example comment titles). See the Stallion Responsive SEO Super Comments Tutorial for more details. For all other WordPress theme users the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin below gives Google and other search engines access to your comments in a format that allows search engine spiders to index and rank comments in their own right. Download WordPress SEO Comments Plugin from WordPress.org plugin repository. February 5th 2016 Update v2.2 Release: Fixed a couple of bugs. Had […]
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WordPress Comments SEO
Dave, You have very wisely change “leave a comment” to “Leave a comment for…” Just an idea for you to Optimize the WordPress themes further, would it be any value to do the same type of thing for the wordpress “more” button under ‘write a post’ – ‘code’ tab? That is “More about….” instead of just “more” Just and idea – your wordpress SEO templates are so good I do not want spoil the broth.
Also your ‘nofollow’ is not going to be on the archives, I hope, just some of the things you mentioned above such as RSS. I am happy with what you have created in the past, and I hope to be a source of referals to you because I have seen the results on my own blog with your adsense optmized templates.
WordPress Comments SEO
WordPress SEO More Links Optimization
Hi Mark,
The More links if I recall correctly are hard coded into the main WordPress files (not part of the theme).
That said there’s 2 ways around this. One is to code a theme to automatically show an excerpt like you see for the home and archive pages on this theme (check the more links on the home page for example, they are automated).
Second way is to use a WordPress plugin.
There are pros and cons for both versions. The first option means no editing by the user (so easy to implement), but unlike the plugin version it stops another plugin I use (Alinks) from linking from keywords within the excerpt of archive pages.
I plan to add a list of useful plugins to use on this site when I get the time and so they’ll need to work with the templates for sale.
If you compare these 2 home pages
Plugin –
Non-plugin –
You can see the plugin version has links within the excerpt content (good for SEO reasons).
I’d like to put both options in with the default being plugin free and the plugin version only working when the plugin is installed. So far hit a brick wall with this, but will get it eventually.
BTW if I update a theme someone has paid for I’ll automatically send them the latest version, unless it’s a rewrite like the difference between versions 02 and 03 of my AdSense themes (I don’t see that happening though, the current AdSense code is great).
Not sure what you mean about RSS links on archive pages? Basically RSS links waste PR/link benefit and can mess with SERPs because occasionally the feed page is better optimized than the original posts. Since the feed pages lack clickable links visitors can’t access your blog when they enter your site into a feed!
For this reason it’s best to rel=nofollow as many RSS links as you can. Some are hard coded, so can’t get them all without editing the main WordPress files (I can do it, but many users can’t).
Other than those RSS feed pages all others pages have standard links and so archive pages (monthly, category, daily etc…) should still be fully indexed as long as the theme supports that type of archive (some by default don’t show a daily or yearly archive for example).
David
WordPress SEO More Links Optimization
WordPress SEO Value of Pingbacks and Trackbacks?
Hello Dave, thanks for your recent SEO tips about my site, very useful!
I’d like advice on using pingbacks/trackbacks in my comments. I currently allow them when I publish a blog but don’t normally approve them in my own comments. Should I approve them? Should I only approve some of them & if so depending on what? If I approve them arn’t I creating reciprocal links, which I thought google doesn’t like anymore?
Cheers (& thanks for allowing my last ‘charity’ comment)
David.
WordPress SEO Value of Pingbacks and Trackbacks?
WordPress SEO - Comment Pingbacks and Trackbacks SEO Value
Personally I always turn pingbacks off, I’ve found it results in too much temporary SPAM links where a link is added to a page temporarily just for the trackback and when you check the page the link is gone. I run so many sites with so many potential pages to add trackbacks to I don’t have the time to check out real trackbacks.
Also when I see WordPress sites with trackbacks on I never read or follow those links. I think they clutter the comments area.
Then there’s internal trackbacks, they tend not to read too well and remember default WordPress adds nofollow attributes to all comment links (nofollow deletes link benefit!!!) so if you want your posts to link together use something like the related posts plugin from the SEO plugins page as that will pass link benefit (there’s no SEO harm in linking internal related pages together, it’s good SEO practice).
I’m thinking about adding the option to have dofollow links in comments rather than the form post button links that pass no link benefit. Will give Talian 05 users the option of blocking passing link benefit (without wasting link benefit as you get with nofollow) or allowing comment author links to pass link benefit.
David
WordPress SEO - Comment Pingbacks and Trackbacks SEO Value
SEO Recent Comments Widget
Hi Dave, one question for you on the “Stallion SEO Recent Comments” widget. Til now I have been using the previous “XX Stallion Recent Comments 12” widget.
My question is, would using the newer “Stallion SEO” widget give additional SEO benefit, in terms of not wasting link benefit on those comment links? Or does the old “XX Stallion” comments widget do the same, in terms of preserving link benefit?
If it does not do so, I’d like to switch to the “Stallion SEO” comments widget. However I was wondering if there was a way to use it without showing comment excerpts or gravatars (I don’t see any explicit feature in the widget for turning these off).
My reasoning is that I like these recent comment links in a tight compact box (with the excerpts & gravatars, it takes up a lot of sidebar real estate).
However if there is no SEO/link benefit difference between these two, I suppose I’d just stay with the “XX” widget.
Thanks much!
Erik
SEO Recent Comments Widget
WordPress Recent Comments Widget SEO Version
SEO wise there’s not a great deal of difference between the Stallion SEO Recent Comments widget and the XX Stallion Recent Comments 12 widget. They are both SEO’d, unlike other WordPress recent comment widgets that add a link to the comment authors website with a nofollow link that deletes link benefit!
The new version (Stallion SEO Recent Comments widget) has more options, the gravatar and description, but the link part are identical, a text link to the comment only (no author link, no wasted link benefit).
The gravatar is loaded as a background image using CSS which SEO wise is neutral (invisible to Google), so having a gravtar/not having a gravatar with those two widgets is identical SEO wise. The description can be argued both good and bad SEO wise, depends on the site really, I use it for usability, users seem to like the comment links with description more than just the link, presumably as it gives an indication of what the comment is about so morelikely to be clicked on.
David
WordPress Recent Comments Widget SEO Version
WP Recent Comments Excerpt
Thanks Dave, yes that is a good point and something to consider.
Seeing a comment excerpt may encourage click throughs to the comment itself. Good to know the XX version is SEO’ed in the same manner as the latest.
WordPress Plugin Subscribe to Comments Reloaded
Any idea how to remove the byline on the management page that is created at /comment-subscriptions ? without turning it off site-wide?
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded WordPress Plugin
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded isn’t my plugin, so no idea.
David
SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin
I based the new WordPress SEO plugin on the SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin by Prevolac.
I’ve been working with the plugins code for years, I first created an SEO version for the Talian 5 SEO/AdSense theme (about 5 years ago) and when I updated Talian 5 to Stallion 6 WordPress SEO I added a highly modified version of the SEO Super Comments plugin directly into the theme.
The Stallion theme I develop is currently in version 8 (Stallion Responsive) and includes a HIGHLY modified version of the code that’s integrated with dozens of other theme SEO features.
As you can see have spent a lot of time on developing with the SEO Super Comments plugin code over the past 5 years.
Unfortunately the author (Vladimir Prelovac) of the SEO Super Comments plugin is no longer developing the plugin (no update since 2011) and the plugin is seriously out of date and broken: doesn’t work because when WordPress added canonical URL support it broke the SEO Super Comments.
My new WordPress SEO Comments Plugin is based on the SEO Super Comments plugin, but with significant modification.
I’ve fixed all the code warnings and errors, updated depreciated WordPress code, completely removed the comment author link options (potentially SEO damaging) and changed the way the links to the comment pages are generated which should fix the issues where the SEO Super Comments plugin didn’t work with some WordPress themes.
The old plugin used preg_replace (PHP function) to find the comment author links or author name and replace it with a link to the SEO Super Comment. This was prone to failing, for example it didn’t work with Talian 5 (one of the reasons I had to create a modified version all those years ago), and when I was creating my WordPress SEO plugin this way of generating the comment link resulted in the WordPress Recent Comments widget (in the TwentyFourteen theme) had it’s comment author names and URLs replaced with the SEO Super Comments links and in some cases the links were broken!
This way of adding comment page links has been completely replaced with the more recent WordPress add_filter API linking into the comment_text output. Shouldn’t matter what WordPress theme you use, the add_filter function should add the comment links to the bottom right of all comments. Basically if the theme you use, uses the “comment_text” (pretty sure all themes do) a comment page link will be generated at the bottom right of your comments.
David Law
SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin
WordPress Comment Plugins
Thanks for updating the Prelovac plug-in and sharing your work.
I can see that your main interest has been SEO-related. My main interest in the plug-in is developing something useful and interesting for site-commenters and others, since I think that with the “Commenter Pages” might make for added value – with each Commenter Page serving almost as a mini-blog or sub-blog for the commenters, and also as a handy repository for their comments. (Registered users or members/contributors could avail themselves of author pages that amounted to their own home pages and would replace Commenter Pages.)
Whether the end result will be a set of tweaks based on your work or something merely inspired by it, I cannot say right now.
WordPress Comment Plugins