Comment on WordPress SEO Plugins by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO Plugins With WordPress plugins you should aim to use as few plugins as possible.

There’s quite a few that are VERY anti-SEO, for example most of the WordPress plugins that add Digg and similar links to your WordPress blogs are awful SEO wise because the majority use links to Digg, Facebook, Twitter etc… that Google can read (basically a text link), so if you have an article with half a dozen links to Digg, Facebook, Twitter etc… it’s costing you a LOT of link benefit!

I was trying a popular one out a few weeks back and it added loads of text links that were hidden with javascript, but Google could read the text links! Some add nofollow links which is just as bad as that deletes link benefit now!

Then there’s the WordPress plugin authors that add a hidden link to their site from the plugin. I use a Comment rating plugin on some of my sites like (creates thumb links to click). If you install the comment rating plugin with the default settings it starts hiding comments that are marked down a few times (very low threshold) and creates a show hidden comment link PLUS a link to the comment authors website! I removed the code from the plugin I use (so not an issue for me), but if you leave the default settings you will send loads of links to the author of the plugins site without realising it. Only way to disable it is to set the threshold really high so it’s highly unlikely a comment will ever be hidden, though it does remove the hide feature!

David