Comment on WordPress Theme Development by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive WordPress Theme I think I’m going to have to block you from these comments Clayton, you keep finding my mistakes :)

Thought I’d covered the author pages, apparently not. The header.php code of the themes are very complex now and I’ve missed out the code for author names so it shows the H1 version of the blog name.

Easy to fix when you know how.

Editing header.php find

class=”header_site_desc”

below it is the code for the large link to the blogs home page.

What I’ve done here is create two** versions of this link, one is within a H1 header for pages that have no real SEO focus (monthly archive pages and the home page for example) and another that has no H1 header for pages with a keyword focus like category pages, single blog post pages etc… This way the H1 header on single blog posts are used for the name of the page which is the title of the post is keyword rich will help with the pages SERPs.

I should have added the author code within the H1 version as those pages have no keyword focus.

Find

if (is_page("archives") || is_year() || is_month() || is_day() || is_home())

Change to

if (is_page("archives") || is_year() || is_month() || is_day() || is_home() || is_author())

Save, upload and that will fix the problem.

**Actually it’s three versions, but one is to make the themes backwards compatible with early WordPress versions that don’t use the tag function, pre 2.3, lots of new themes that include tags on the menu etc… won’t work on WP 1.0 to 2.2, mine do by adding an if statement when including tag coding, if it’s not WordPress 2.3+ the tag coding is ignored and the theme should still work.

Glad I’ve only sent out the update for the Talian theme so far :) can fix this oversight before sending out update. I won’t send this out as a Talian update right away (will add to the next update and for new orders) since few people use the author pages, most blogs have one author. If a past customer wants this change and don’t want to do the editing above drop me an email listing the email address you used to order your theme and I’ll send it out ASAP.

Regarding your author pages, like monthly archive pages they have no real SEO focus and so from an SEO perspective don’t add anything to a site. This is why I removed the author links from all the themes: on most themes where you see the name of an author who posted the post (on my themes not linked) there would be a link to the authors page (like your author menu links). Since most WordPress blogs are single author sites this results in a set of archives pretty much identical to the home page archives.

Duplicate content = waste of link power and possible Google mixups: for example if there’s just the admin posting to a site the admin author page will be identical to the home page and there’s a very small risk Google will remove your home page from the search index and list the admin author page as more important (depends a lot on backlinks and luck, Google is FAR from perfect). From experience I know not to take risks with duplicate content, I’ve seen Google do some very strange things.

David Law