Comment on WordPress Image Slideshow by SEO Dave.

WordPress Slideshow This is what I hate about using WordPress plugins, so much potential for SEO damage.

The “subscribe” without commenting link passes link benefit. This means every post with comments enabled has a link wasting link benefit.

The subscribe to pages has the following SEO mistakes.

A meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’

What this means is the link benefit passed via the subscribe link is completely wasted. A best case scenario should be

meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,follow’
or just
meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex’

We don’t want these pages indexed, they add nothing to the site, but we don’t want the links from these pages nofollowed, at least we can recover some of the link benefit by following the links from these pages, this would at least recover around 85% of the lost link benefit.

Broken canonical URL

link rel='canonical' href='http://www.stallion-theme.com/http://www.stallion-theme.com/?page_id=9999999'

Should be

link rel='canonical' href='http://www.stallion-theme.com/stallion-wordpress-theme-layoutdesign-options'

or you could get away with

link rel='canonical' href='http://www.stallion-theme.com/'

The current canonical URL is completely broken.

To Google a canonical URL is a 301 redirect that doesn’t redirect in the browser. Google sends the link benefit hitting the page to the canonical URL minus a small dampening factor (having a canonical or 301 redirect costs a small amount of PR, I assume around 15%).

Looks like I’m editing another plugin for SEO reasons :-(

What I’ll probably do since it’s just for my sites (I might upload it for other stallion users as well) is turn the subscription link into post forms with CSS styling to look like a text link like Stallion uses for author comment links so no link benefit is even sent to the subscribe pages, remove the nofollow code and see if I can fix the canonical URL.

David