WordPress SEO now in public beta

11 October 2010 | 161 Comments | Tags Software releases and updates, WordPress, Yoast SEO | By Joost de Valk

I’ll be honest. I had not expected so many of my newsletter readers to start testing, but I’m deeply thankful that they (you) did. All your testing and your reports towards me allowed me to squash many many bugs, documentation inconsistencies and more over the last three days, resulting in one of the biggest changelogs I’ve ever written for a single release.

I’ve taken the time tonight to give the plugin a true home: it now has a page on yoast.com: WordPress SEO plugin, with a feature list and subpages for the three modules it’ll have.

WordPress.org

I’ve also just pulled the trigger and uploaded the plugin to WordPress.org, you can find it here. There are no stable versions yet, so auto update probably won’t work yet, but you can download the latest version from the WordPress.org plugin repository now.

You can of course, if you like it, also rate it with 5 stars, I wouldn’t mind you doing that at all, as you can imagine.

The fact that it’s now on WordPress.org also means I now have support forums there. Some of you had already started using those, and I’ll be using them to take feedback from you, although you’re still very welcome to email me as well. Changelogs will also be made for each update, and you’ll always find them here. That page contains the changelog between the first beta and the current one too, have a read if you want, it’s huge.

Modules

So there are a couple of things I owe you, as loyal readers, an explanation on. First of all, this module thing. The plugin allows for modules to be loaded that add functionality to the plugin. I currently have three of these planned:

The News SEO module, which is already in the download you can currently get from WordPress.org, is and will remain free. It allows generation of an XML News Sitemap, which you’ll need if you want to be included in Google News. More features will be added to that later.

The other two modules will be paid modules; they serve a more niche market and will require quite a bit of work to get right, hence the need for them to be paid. All three modules are developed by me in partnership with a subject matter expert, what they’ll do and who these guys are is outlined on the pages above. Trust me, they’re the best in the business.

Beta period

Second: this plugin is STILL in beta. It will probably remain in beta for at least another 2 weeks, maybe more. Your testing is very much appreciated and will remain to be very much appreciated. Whether you’re sending me technical things that don’t work or lines of text you don’t understand or could be improved: it’s all great.

Integration

I’m happy to say that Scribe SEO has been updated to work well with WordPress SEO, and the needed adaptions have been made to make it work well with Genesis too. The same work is underway for Thesis, and I’ve also been talking to the WPML team to make sure the WordPress SEO plugin is fully compatible with WPML as well.

Lastly, Nathan Rice of StudioPress has been so kind to promise to update his SEO Data Transporter plugin soon to work with the plugin too, so you can easily move data back and forth between this plugin and other SEO plugins, should you ever want to switch away from this one…

This is a very exciting time for me, and I’m very thankful for the help that everyone has provided so far, let’s make this a great success together!

Joost de Valk

Joost is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Yoast. He has a long history in WordPress and digital marketing. On our blog, he has written a lot about SEO in general, technical SEO and important topics related to SEO.

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161 Responses to WordPress SEO now in public beta

Adam Cap • 14 years ago

Just found a bug with the Post Titles function:

If you have a title that includes a colon (aka “:”), it cuts off the rest of the title.

For example, this was the SEO title I saved:

“Vilegar VIP: “Very Important Poltergeist” | My Site Name”
After I saved my post, this all that was left:

“Vilegar VIP:”

Hope that helps…
CharlieB • 14 years ago

Question about the Google News Sitemap. According to Google “Your News Sitemap should contain only URLs for your articles published in the last two days.” as referenced on this page http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=74288

Can you share how the Google News Option/feature will work on the WordPress SEO plugin and if it will be updated to only show the last two days of posts?

Thanks! Sure loving this new WordPress SEO plugin! it is awesome!
- CharlieB • 14 years ago
  
  Oh…I feel a big smile coming on….:))
  
  Thanks!
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  It currently doesn’t do that but the plan is certainly to start doing that in the next update, due … end of day tomorrow :)
Zachary Cameron • 14 years ago

Tried it out on my site, but using SenSEO to test keywords, WordPress SEO scores lower than both Platinum SEO and All In One. I probably haven’t set it up perfectly, but I will try again in a few days. One problem was that it wasn’t auto generating meta-descriptions for posts even with using the excerpt tag.
matt • 14 years ago

In the plugin setting title template area for page I placed only %%titlle%%. However, it is outputting the page title and site title. Is there a way to only output a page title even if I have a site title set?

I have the most basic wp_title(”); in the head section of my header file.

Also, as mentioned above, do you plan on making the titles auto update? It doesn’t seem very practical having to go into each post or page to refresh if a change is made to the template.
mustafa • 14 years ago

Out of curiosity, at what rate will you put a caps on the local SEO module? I definitely could use those :)
Adam Cap • 14 years ago

Hey Joost,

This plugin rocks! I was able to disable like 5 other plugins after installing this beast of yours.

1 Issue: I’m not sure if this is just me, but the “Titles” functioning doesn’t work how I thought it would (because of my theme I think, Atahualpa).

For example, on the post template I thought this should be used: %%title%% | %%sitename%% but it seems like %%sitename%% is by default added to the end of everything, so that made it show my site name twice in the title.

Upon further inspection, it looks like whatever I defined as my site title in WP General Settings is what is being thrown onto the everything, no matter what. I guess this is something I’ll need to fix. :(

Anyway, great work!
- Rick • 14 years ago
  
  How where you able to fix this? I’m having the same problem.
  
  What general settings for Yoast WordPress SEO: Titles do ya’ll recommend?
  
  Thanks for heads up on %%title%% | %%sitename%%
  - Adam Cap • 14 years ago
    
    Grrr. This should work:
    
    <title><?php wp_title(”); ?></title>
  - Adam Cap • 14 years ago
    
    Sorry my code didn’t show up.
    
    This is what you need:
  - Adam Cap • 14 years ago
    
    It was an issue with my theme.
    
    In your header.php, make sure this code appears:
    
    And you should be ok. Delete any other variations of that if you see any. %%title%% | %%sitename%% worked after I got that code into place.
- Adam Cap • 14 years ago
  
  Also: SEO titles within the post don’t get automatically created or updated after I make/change my post title.
  
  I have to click “Regenerate SEO Title” to make it not be blank. I don’t know if this is what you intended, but I think it would be most convenient if that updated automatically in future versions. :)
- Adam Cap • 14 years ago
  
  Edited my theme and fixed the problem. Found a new issue though:
  
  Redirect ugly URL’s to clean permalinks
  
  When you enable that, you can’t see changes you make when you preview posts. Pretty big issue IMO.
Jan Egbert • 14 years ago

When I define a custom title tag and description for a certain post or page and I save it, all goes well. However, after one or two seconds all custom settings jump back to default settings. The same thing happens when I open a post or page with custom title tag and description. I’m using the Hybrid Framework and I disabled the theme’s SEO features. Seems like a small bug to me.
- Jan Egbert • 14 years ago
  
  Update: custom descriptions seem to be working fine. Buggy custom title tags remaining.
Jose Gonzalez • 14 years ago

Hi Joost,

I’m having the same issue as a few others here with the breadcrumbs: no text (or link) appears for the home page (just the breadcrumb path prefix and the page name).

I’m using the StudioPress Streamline theme, and replacing the with your code.

I realise that this is not your plugin, but rather the theme playing up :) but I thought I’d mention it anyway. I can live without the optimised breacrumbs.

Awesome plugin – I’m looking forward to seeing what the local seo features are and the pricing.

Regards
Jose
- Jose Gonzalez • 14 years ago
  
  Sorry: that should say: I’m using StudioPress Streamline and replacing their breadcrumb code with yours.
gadget • 14 years ago

Does, or will, this plugin support Microformats such as the hReview element? Or do you see that as being kept seperate?
- Ramoonus • 14 years ago
  
  I`ve seen an SEO plugin which supports hReview.
  - gadget • 14 years ago
    
    Are you referring to this plugin? Has anyone used it or can recommend it?
Jim • 14 years ago

Hello Joost,

I’m currently impressed from this plugin and already using it to some websites.

Is there an option to disable Canonical Links to specific pages? Or to disable theme completely from the plugin? It will be nice to see this feature added, since some blogs have problems with unindexed pages from google when have the rel=”canonical” meta.

Thanks in advance, Jim.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Hey Jim,
  
  I’m sorry but that’s just bull :) you can only have issues with canonical if you’re doing it wrong, which, obviously, this plugin tries to prevent. Until I’ve seen sufficiently proven results otherwise, I won’t add another option for it :)
sparsh • 14 years ago

nice plugin. i will download and try this plugin for my wordpress blog site soon.
Cory Howell • 14 years ago

Looks like it wouldn’t accept my code on the last post.

Anyway, the canonical tag was using “categorypage/number” instead of “category/page/number”

Removed the plugin until it can be resolved.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Yeah that bug has been fixed in my development version, expect an update soon.
Cory Howell • 14 years ago

I am using the plugin w/ the PageNavi plugin and it looks like their is a compatibility issue w/ the canonical tag.

You’ll notice in this URL that there is no “/” before the word “page” in the string.

Any ideas?
Antonio • 14 years ago

Hi Joost,

is it possible to show the same meta description for all posts in a given category?

BR
- Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  No it’s not, and that would, to be honest, be a fairly stupid idea. A meta description has to be unique for each page, as otherwise it’s not useful at all.
Jose Gonzalez • 14 years ago

Sorry – my fault. The cache hadn’t flushed properly. Amateur mistake there.

The XML sitemap works beautifully
:)_

Cheers
Jose
Jose Gonzalez • 14 years ago

Quick question – about the sitemap: I’ve deleted the xml sitemap plugin and rebuilt the sitemap using your plugin, but when I go see the sitemap, I’m seeing what appears to be the sitemap page generated by the precious plugin?

It says in the top area of the sitemap: Google Sitemap Generator Plugin by Arne Brachhold.

I’ve rebuilt the sitemap a couple of times from the dashboard of your plugin, to try and force the new one, but no change.

Just pointing this out – not sure about this.

Cheers
Jose
Jose Gonzalez • 14 years ago

An by the way: the snazzy dynamic meta tag snippet viewer = GENIUS!
- Daniel Haim • 14 years ago
  
  Are you Jose Gonzalez the singer? : )
Ilja Seur • 14 years ago

I am sure i haven’t got the latest version. So ill try the latest one and i’ll let you know.
Thanks for your reply.

Ilja
- Ilja Seur • 14 years ago
  
  Downloaded the latest version, tested it and it is working.
  Thanks. my mistake.
  
  regards,
  
  Ilja
  - ^ Post author
    Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
    
    Good to hear that, thanks for testing!!
Ilja Seur • 14 years ago

Hey Joost,

I tested your plugin. Looks great but came up an error.
I work with a theme pluging for selling products digital or feeds. This theme works with an import function. That function is for importing feeds, Amazon products and more. Your pluging import feature is interfering with that import feature. Meaning that when i want to use the import data feature of the shop plugin, it will redirect to your import feature. It looks like you both use the same php file name admin.php?page=import. Changing this to something more unique will solve the problem if you ask me. admin.php?page=importSEO or whatever.

Keep up the great work.

Ilja
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  hmm do you have the latest version? the page is actually wpseo_import now?
  - Bank Informer • 14 years ago
    
    Same here Joost,
    if you import feeds to make posts automatically the sitemap wont rebuild from alone :(
    We use feedwordpress.
    
    Thx
    - Bank Informer • 14 years ago
      
      Actually a lot of the functionality is lost if you import feeds.
      
      – As mentioned above, the sitemap file does not get generated on feed import
      – The “focus keyword” does not get inserted, its just empty
      – The “meta description” is empty
      – The “SEO Title” is missing in the “all posts view”, but shows up once you click to edit the post. Once saved after editing the title shows also in the “all posts” section
      
      Is there a chance to fill those on autopilot somehow? Might not be best, but better than NOTHING in there ;)
      
      The plugin would be rather useless for this often used feature of importing feeds? Or is there something we are missing here Yoast?
      
      We hope that this helps to make this the best SEO plugin.
      
      Thanks
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
      
      Hey,
      
      – As mentioned above, the sitemap file does not get generated on feed import
      
      that’s probably something I can fix.
      
      – The “focus keyword” does not get inserted, its just empty
      
      the focus keyword is not used for optimization, it’s used as a writing guide…
      
      – The “meta description” is empty
      
      A meta description has to be unique for a page, if it’s not, there’s no reason why it should be generated. Listen to our recent podcast with Matt Cutts, around the 30th minute, for an explanation.
      
      – The “SEO Title” is missing in the “all posts view”, but shows up once you click to edit the post. Once saved after editing the title shows also in the “all posts” section
      
      Yes, this is a known issue and is on the list to be fixed :)
- Daniel H. • 14 years ago
  
  Have the same issue, we’re using AutoBlogged to import RSS feeds. The error that I’m receiving is coming up with generating a sitemap.
Jan Egbert • 14 years ago

The WordPress SEO plugin breaks the media uploader in wp-admin/post.php. Or at least it does so in one of my sites. Firebug detects the follow error: keywords[i].replace is not a function http://www.website.nl/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/js/wp-seo-metabox.js?ver=3.0.1 Line 146
Azzam • 14 years ago

I tested the plugin on two sites one had Thesis themes with its own SEO functions. The problem that arises for me is that the caption codes from the post were generated in the description box and I could not get rid of them, this however did not happen in the non-thesis theme but unsure if it is related.
- robert vayner • 14 years ago
  
  Azzam , same over here on caption codes with thesis theme.
  
  i been waiting as i know Joost and Chris are working it out …
  
  Joost ,
  any suggestions for the thesis community for now ?
  
  would you advice using thesis or your plugin in the case of features that cross with thesis ?
  
  thank you for such great product !
Berry van der Linden • 14 years ago

Hello Joost,

The only thing I am missing here is Headspaces’ yahoo suggest in the tag section.

Other than that great plugin.

Thanks,
Berry van der Linden
Peter Knight • 14 years ago

Hi Joost,

what is the projected release date for the local and video modules? What’s the price point going to be like and will there be varying price packages (one-site/multi-site)?

Also, would love to how your plugin differs from Headspace, I’ve found headspace to be pretty deep in features (conditional javascript/css etc), thoughts?

Glad you built a true all-in-one solution, was definitely needed in the market.
Emil Soleyman • 14 years ago

Replying to myself.

I found the culprit. Just add a meta description for the Forum page and all should be good.
Emil Soleyman • 14 years ago

Hi Joost,

It seems that there is a plugin conflict with Simple:Press where the forum just doesn’t display. I’d love to debug this and find out what is causing it but am unsure as how to proceed.
Bank Informer • 14 years ago

Hey Joost,

We switched happily from AIO-SEO to your plugin since we like the work you did with all the other plugins. And we kinda think you know a bit (or two) about SEO ;)
The problem we discovered so far is that the sitemap wont re-generate after posts are published. It works fine from the admin menu “(re)Build xml sitemap”, but not in auto-mode unfortunately :(
It is supposed to do this automatically, right? Otherwise we need to hire you Joost to press the button every now and then for us :P
Thanks for the work on this though, we expect it to be “the best SEO-plugin” soon…
Dan • 14 years ago

Yoast thanks for your great work on this.

Is there any plan for functionality of a link out type functionality such as below:

http://www.example.com/blog-post/?af=affiliatecode then the links that that are going external to our other websites would be http://www.ourothersite.com/?af=affiliatecode

This would allow our affiliates to get credit across multiple websites. Does anyone know a similar plugin/functionality. Does this have any performance or SEO implications?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Yeah I wouldn’t do that unless you absolutely have to, you’re basically creating duplicate content. It’s not going to be a part of this plugin at least, you’d have to code your own…
  - Dan • 14 years ago
    
    Thanks Yoast, yes I shall have to look into this further, we will do our own. Am I correct that we need to pay careful attention to the canonicalisation of the urls, I’ve noticed before multiple versions being indexed and tried to clean this up in webmaster tools.
    - Dan • 14 years ago
      
      Just noticed basecamphq has the same issue, with affiliates like basecamphq.com/?referrer=xxxx being indexed. Our affiliate system already works like this as well, so I’m guessing it’s worth just continuing as is.
      
      Is the SEO implication that bad we would go back and change the system?
      
      Thanks mate for the plugin we will definitely be using it on all our wordpress sites.
Chris Olbekson • 14 years ago

Joost,

Loving the plugin. I implemented it on a client production site today that has over 1600 indexed pages. The only issue so far is the memory limit issue when building the sitemap that I mentioned to you on Twitter. I had to up the memory limit in php.ini to 512M to get it to build then it failed when we started publishing posts.

It’s not a big deal because we decided to eliminate the sitemap altogether after researching and reading some of your articles about it.

BTW the site is running Thesis and no conflict issues but they were not using the Thesis SEO features.
Daniel H. • 14 years ago

Hi Yoast,

It seems as if I’m getting an error on the server log,

[Wed Oct 20 14:02:40 2010] [error] [client 24.103.43.50] PHP Warning: fopen(/var/www/vhosts/bloginity.com/httpdocs/news_sitemap.xml.gz) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/vhosts/bloginity.com/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/sitemaps/xml-sitemap-base-class.php on line 21, referer: http://www.bloginity.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=AutoBloggedSupport&upgrade_db=1

Any idea?
Nick Laubscher • 14 years ago

Hi Joost

You wrote “No, meta keywords is not needed for any major search engine anymore, so they don’t get added.”

If meta keywords aren’t relevant anymore, is keyword research still important? Are tags now important?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  It still is important, you still need to know which keywords you want to rank for, which is why my plugin asks for a specific focus keyword that it then checks your copy, title etc. for. Simply telling a search engine “i would like to be ranked for these keywords” using the meta keywords element however doesn’t work anymore.
Yui Mousa • 14 years ago

Just thought I’d chime in and say that I absolutely adore this plugin and it works a charm. However I noticed that: meta keywords aren’t being generated and so checked the source of your site and the same is happening. Is this normal, are meta keywords not required as much for seo anymore?
Thanks
michaelg • 14 years ago

looking forward to implementing this with thesis!
great work so far joast
Cor van Noorloos • 14 years ago

Except of some, rather big, ‘Title Settings’ issues on Twenty Ten I’m really loving this plugin.

Could you tell if it would be possible to disable these settings for now leaving the rest of the plugin intact? It’s quite hard to see this mod disabled seeing all other features left remaining :)
Hugo • 14 years ago

Whoaa this is a great plugin, wp at its best.

Bugs and fixes:
– Inside the post in admin the Snippet Preview and Meta Description boxes expand with the text inside, is it missing some fixed width?
– HTML Entity Codes – reply to: Antonio and Christian Brix
Just found out how to display different characters like: á, é, í / æ, ø, å from wp suport, thanks to Chrwey. Here´s how:

change htmlentities(stripslashes($title)) to stripslashes($title) in frontend/class-frontend.php

Thanks for the plugin, great work.
Daniel • 14 years ago

Hi Yoast, enjoying the plugin so far. I think there should be something set with Google News though, Google News sitemap should only capture the past 4 days or so. (I believe it’s in their Guidelines) Although I haven’t received an error yet on webmaster tools.

I also think that in regards to title tag there should be a bit more control

a) mass editing tag / categories
b) I would personally love to have the option that if a post title tag is not set it automatically becomes whatever I set up, in my case %%title%% – Bloginity News! however sometimes for specific articles I will define “Audrina Patridge Bloginity.com Exclusive Interview” and because of the – Bloginity News! it would be added right after the title I’ve defined.

c) I still use SEO Title Tag for custom title tags for tags, categories & pages. As I said, it would be REALLY epic to have a mass editor.
- Daniel • 14 years ago
  
  Btw Yoast, not sure if you need any help translating this plugin but I can help with Hebrew
Kitty • 14 years ago

Is there a way to index nofollow particular pages?
Desi Matlock • 14 years ago

Hi Joost – Just wanted to let you know that the ONLY reason you’re not getting feedback from me on the beta test is that I haven’t run into any bugs of any kind. It runs smooth as silk for me.
Cliff • 14 years ago

Yoast,

any chance that you’ll do a video on this plugin for guys like myself that are new to WordPress? would love to get the best setting out of WordPress SEO Plugin.
rkbuzz • 14 years ago

yoast,
i get many tips here..

thanks so much. now i bookmarked
SEO Norwich • 14 years ago

Now downloading will definately give a go, thanks for sharing.
Grettir • 14 years ago

Just wondering if there were plans to add the option to specify the location of the XML Sitemap in robots.txt, per:

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php#submit_robots

Thanks for your work. It looks great so far.

– Grettir
Jane • 14 years ago

Is this plugin compatible with the “Builder” Theme from iThemes? Or do you think it will be?
Rob Barham • 14 years ago

Great Plugin. I loved the way you have a tip-off to add the Google blog ping service.
Very thoughtful.

Would it be possible to add %%nextmonth%% to the title settings ? so if it was October, it would display November.
Andrei • 14 years ago

Downloading right now, and I’ll be back with feedback. By the way, do you need any translations? I could help you out with that.

Cheers – Andrei
Graeme Wilson • 14 years ago

Sorry Joost, still no luck with the breadcrumbs and Hybrid theme when adding is automated. I can get it partially working by adding an action in functions.php to call yoast_breadcrumb(). However, the trail is still not adding an entry or link back to the home page. Otherwise, I’m happy with the plugin.
SEOmofo • 14 years ago

The Snippet Preview has a few issues:

* It assumes the published-on date is built into the webmaster’s WP theme in a crawlable fashion (and thus will appear in SERPs).
* It assumes the webmaster has not explicitly set their Google Webmaster Tools configuration to display URLs as domain.com (i.e., without ‘www’).
* The Title’s parent element shouldn’t permit line wrapping.
* Ellipses should be bold.
* Description should be 156 characters or less.
* Titles and Descriptions that exceed their character limits should end in an ellipsis and not terminate mid-word.
* Dates and ellipses should be factored into character counts.
* Description line-wrapping behavior cannot be predicted by a simple character count, as it is not a fixed-width font. Therefore the “…this’ll only stretch one line” notice is inaccurate.

If you’d like, I can write up a simplified version of my SERP Snippet Optimizer tool for you to embed in your WordPress SEO plugin. It would take care of most of the bugs I’ve just listed. Naturally, I’d appreciate some kind of attribution in return. ;) Let me know.

-SEOmofo
Daniel H. • 14 years ago

Having some title tag issues. It seems like all the posts that are not assigned with a title tag automatically display nothing (the permalink) in the header.

I have defined in the header.php the following:

When I define it as only:

The title displays but displays:

Watch the New Gay-Friendly McDonaldâ??s Commercial â??Come As You Areâ?? – Bloginity News<link

Not sure why it's not displaying correctly. But in addition I would love to have this plugin have a mass edit title tags for all categories/tags.
dave • 14 years ago

Other than the video plugin why would i want to switch from all in one seo?

I run a blog where I post videos, mostly from youtube and vimeo. What can the video seo plugin do for me? Can it generate a video sitemap of the youtube/vimeo videos? How will the snippet previews work?
- Kitty's Affair • 14 years ago
  
  Yoast’s seo plugin does a lot of things that All in one seo does not. If you look through the comments and posts you will find answer to that and your video sitemap question.
  - dave • 14 years ago
    
    Did some digging and see now :) Thanks for the info, looks great!
Kevin • 14 years ago

Hi Joost,

Found a few small bugs:
– When saving the title and meta description on a page I could multiple windows opening up saying: 70,5. Maybe I’m oblivious but I’ve got no clue as to what they mean.
– Breadcrumbs doesnt show the Home anchor unless im 2 levels deep.
– Page title doesn’t renew whenever I re-adjust a page, it shows the appropriate titel for a few milli seconds and then switches to the default. They do get displayed properly though. Might be related to W3 Total cache but keep getting the same result after emptieng all caches and deactivating the plugin.

You sir have made my life 10x easier.

Thanks for the plugin, /bow!
- Antonio • 14 years ago
  
  Hi,
  
  I have the same issue. When editing a page, the previous title appear correctly for a while and then update to the original one… If you don’t update the page is fine but if you update it you lose the custom title you had set up before…
  
  BR
Lawrence S. Miller • 14 years ago

Excuse me, guys, I can’t even get a compliment right. I meant to say, I think I speak for many others when I say:

Joost, you’re a godsend to the blogging world. Keep it up, my good man.
Lawrence S. Miller • 14 years ago

Free CDN on one blog and
CDN Tools on another (It appears to me W3 requires a CDN plugin of some sort.)
HeadSpace2
Robots Meta
SEO Slugs
SEO Smart Links
W3 Total Cache
WP Super Cache (Deactivated. Don’t know how to get completely rid of it yet.)
Yoast Breadcrumbs

I am currently using those plugins which are, or which I think may be, SEO related. I have understood from what you told me separately and what I have found in the foregoing comments that your WordPress SEO plugin replaces HeadSpace2, and your Robots Meta and your Yoast Breadcrumbs. Should I delete any of the other plugins mentioned above once I start using your seemingly phenomenal WordPress SEO.

I think I speak for many others when you say, Joost, you’re a godsend to the blogging world. Keep it up, my good man.
Simon • 14 years ago

<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) { yoast_breadcrumb('',''); } ?>

gives me a blank spot (no output). Is that what I was supposed to do?

Cheers Joost!
Fran Civile • 14 years ago

I’m looking forward to using your WordPress Seo plugin Joost! I rely on these webmasters who volunteer to beta-test because I can’t … I’ll just enjoy the results!

Thank you Joost,

Fran
Simon • 14 years ago

Hey Joostm I enjoy beta-testing the plugin, thanks for that. What snippet do I use for breadcrumbs if I want to manually add them to my theme?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Good question! You should use the snippets mentioned here: WordPress breadcrumbs plugin. Will add it to plugin documentation.
simone • 14 years ago

any chance that you’ll implement also the support for microformats and RDFa ? They are an important part of the modern SERPs.
Christian Brix • 14 years ago

Great plugin!

It has one problem/issue/fault which did not exist in “All in one SEO pack”: Local characters/special characters like e.g. æ, ø and å (normal characters in Danish writing) are not displayed correctly..
E.g. you could take a look a the browser bar (or whereever you like to see the title) on this page: http://www.casi.dk/ – it should read “[…] og varmemåling” – NOT “[…] og varmemÃ¥ling”.
If that could be fixed, it would be great.

Also a small suggestion: It would probably be a good help for novices if a standard template for Titles were preset – then they could change what they need instead of having to do everything from scratch.

Thanks again for the great work!
neil • 14 years ago

Joost,

Thanks for keeping these coming! Need any php help on anything?

http://www.linkedin.com/in/neilconway

Thanks again,
Neil
tonyknuckles @113Tidbits • 14 years ago

Just got some really wicked results organically. Can’t wait to see the final version.
Ghassan • 14 years ago

Would it be possible to add the ability to manually add pages to the sitemap.xml with this plugin? This can be done with the XML-Sitemap plugin that I currently use. I like that because I can include my non-wordpress pages from my site onto a single sitemap.

If this is a bad idea SEO wise, that would be great to know too! Thanks. Love everything else in the plugin so far!
Daniel H. • 14 years ago

There’s an issue with Sitemap news. There are couple of things the sitemap news requires to have.

Here is the error I get:

Unexpected publication name
The publication name specified in your Sitemap does not match the publication name we have for your site in our database. Please check that the publication name in your Sitemap exactly matches the publication name displayed for your articles in Google News.
URL:
http://www.bloginity.com/blog/2010/10/13/zoolander-2
Problem detected on: Oct 13, 2010
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Great find Daniel, thanks… Will fix ASAP :)
simone • 14 years ago

you are still missing RDFa and microformats support, i think.
Carlos Correza • 14 years ago

wow that’s a great plugin.
Daniel H. • 14 years ago

Hiya Yoast, congrats on this incredible plugin. Wow, I took like 3 hours off today just to mess around with it. This surely combines several plugins and personally I hate using too many plugins but with SEO sometimes I have to. It helped me get rid of your old Robots Meta, SEO Title Tag + Headspace2 + All in one SEO. Really great plugin, I’m going to send a feedback from time to time.
Steve Jennings • 14 years ago

Arghhhhh – just spent a fortune in time and money on developing some video seo functionality in house, I’ll have a look at your plugin and see if there’s anything we’ve got that you missed!
Toolboxhero • 14 years ago

What plugins does this replace? I like to have clean WordPress installs and which ones can I get rid of?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Depends what you were using :) It replaces my robots meta, rss footer, breadcrumbs and permalink redirect plugins and AIOSEO / HeadSpace2.
FeatherDev • 14 years ago

im test it, but not use for my blog until final version relise.
tonyknuckles @113Tidbits • 14 years ago

Been using it from the very start Joost and have had no issues or problems with installation and implementation. Thank you for your very easy to use application.
Krims@nline • 14 years ago

Joost, this absolutely a stunning plugin … I just love it! Though I think I’m having an issue:
– When editing a page (in my case the home page), I filled in the SEO title, but when I quick edit the page, the field SEO title is blanks ?
– When entering focus keywords, if I enter one keyword it displays where it finds it, when I enter multiple it doesn’t display wher it finds it but they are in bold in the slug ?
– Should these keywords by parsed on the page as ‘meta keywords’ ? because i don’t see them ?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  – The quick edit is indeed broken, since there’s no proper API for it it’ll probably be removed, unfortunately.
  – Focus keyword only supports one focus keyword or key phrase.
  – No, meta keywords is not needed for any major search engine anymore, so they don’t get added.
Mikal • 14 years ago

Ill think ill try this one:-)

Hope it works well.

Thanks
David • 14 years ago

has anyone tried this plugin yet on a Thesis skinned wordpress set up? I cant help but wondering if there would be any conflicts with some SEO functionalities/features on Thesis…. I guess I’ll to try it out and see
- robert vayner • 14 years ago
  
  David, any prob’s with thesis so far ? Joost is working with Chris so its a matter of time.
  unless already good to go ?
  i will be implementing in my sandbox thesis today, if you have any news please let me know and i will do same..
  
  good luck !
- Donna • 14 years ago
  
  Yes David it currently doesn’t work but Joost is getting a fix soon.. Hope it comes quickly so i can convert all my sites.. I’m very impressed sofar. :)
WpHey • 14 years ago

Great, can’t wait to test it out, thanks Joost.
Lawrence S. Miller • 14 years ago

I can hardly wait until you release the final version of WordPress SEO.
Hans • 14 years ago

I think i found it, i have to switch from the memory_limit = 8M to 16M in the php.ini. hopefully my hoster is capable of doing this :-)

bye bye :-)
Hans • 14 years ago

Hi Joost,

when i try to activate the plugin i get this error message:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 122880 bytes) in /home/www/web000/html/dontshowit/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/admin/class-config.php on line 602

What can i do?

Greetings
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Not much there other than increase mem size, it’s trying to allocate like 100k, which is not really that much? :)
  - Hans • 14 years ago
    
    Thank you, i think we posted in the same second :-)
David • 14 years ago

Hi Joost, thanks for this mighty contribution! It´ll be the best SEO-plugin around once all the bugs are squashed! (Of course)
I´m not sure where you want people to report bugs they´ve found, so I´ll report one here straight away:

Parent category link in the breadcrumbs trail is not working properly. Mine looks like this:
/?taxonomy=&term=test-2
whilst showing a post published within the child category. The parent category link is correct if I go to the child category itself, rather than to a post within the child category.

Btw, since you decided to include just about everything on my wishlist, I might as well drop one feature that I´d like to see included in the plugin in the future;
The ability to control url depth freely. There is a plugin for it, i think it´s called “custom permalinks”, but it´s a little troublesome at times.
Let me know what you think!
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Hey David, thanks for the feedback!
  
  Parent category link problem found and fixed, will be fixed in 0.1.2
  
  Will have a look at custom permalinks but could you elaborate on what you’d want exactly?
  - David • 14 years ago
    
    You are most welcome. Right, about the custom permalink suggestion: I like to use category depth to structure content and by doing that I get the opportunity to emphasize certain parent category pages through breadcrumb links. You know the drill.
    What I also like to do is to have control over url-depth, and the relevancy of keywords in the url. Meaning I usually stick with no depth at all for most of the time (and if possible). I like i this way because all pages get easy to remember url:s and they are also 100% custom to what I want for any specific landing page (category page) no matter the depth.
    So: you know the field present in the post editor, category editor etc, where you can alter the slug, I want the push button to open up and make the whole url-string editable all the way up to the root.
Daniel H. • 14 years ago

I’ve been looking for something to combine Headspace2, All In One SEO (which I don’t like at all) and SEO Title Tag plugin. Some sort of the ultimate solution

I use Headspace2 for the massive title tag and page description editing
I use SEO Title Tag to edit titles for tags, categories, pages,

And I am not sure why I’m using All in one SEO at all. #Truth.

As far as sitemaps go, combining all of these plugins into one should remove a lot of extra-weight on the site. Downloading now, REALLY looking forward to playing with it. (That’s what she said).

– Daniel, SEO Specialist
Tesla • 14 years ago

Doing backflips. Thanks Yoast! And thanks Nathan!
SenseiMattKlein • 14 years ago

Am very excited about the possibility of this plug in with the Thesis theme. Any advantages over the default thesis settings?
TrafficColeman • 14 years ago

I’m going out to installed it now..I’m ready to test it out and see what happens?

“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
Ramoonus • 14 years ago

I still have some ideas for the plugin, which I haven`t told you yet
Im very sorry I didn`t had the chance to email you sooner. busy with deadlines and such

I will do it tonight – if I don`t forget it
Antonio • 14 years ago

Hi Joost,

I am having problems with showing international letters such as
á, é, í, ó and ú… In the titlte it is replaced with an extrange format

ó is replaced with Ã³ instead of &oatilde;

BR
- Daniel H. • 14 years ago
  
  Getting the same issue!
  - David • 14 years ago
    
    This seems to be working now with the latest version! Hooray!! Atleast Swedish å, ä and ö are working.
- Antonio • 14 years ago
  
  I mean, it is replaced inside the title tag .
  In the post editor is correct “ó” and even in your snippet preview I see the “ó” but then in the source code it is not shown correctly
  - ^ Post author
    Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
    
    nothing more fun that debugging sh*t like that :) will have a go at fixing that tomorrow.
    - Marcus  • 14 years ago
      
      I usually find that somewhere along the line, a file is not in UTF-8 format. hope that helps…
      
      David Paulsson  • 14 years ago
      
      Any solution for this yet? I’d REALLY like to start using your plugin for some of the sites we’re making here in Sweden – but as long as the Swedish chars å, ä and ö are displayed like this: no can do :(
      
      Looking forward to a solution!
      
      PS – From what I’ve seen so far by testing it out… GREAT JOB!
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 14 years ago
      
      Well the issue here is probably that entire blogs are not in the right character set…
    - Antonio • 14 years ago
      
      I know… BTW, I have seen this also happens in the sitemap.xml and I think that it might be because of that it doesn’t display correctly in my site…
      
      /sitemap.xml
      
      In chrome is a blank screen
      In firefox Ã?Rest of the title…
      ———————————————^
      In IE9 the same “no valid character” : image:caption>Ã
Pim • 14 years ago

Looks good Joost! Still toying around with it. Found the following though:

How about an option to filter all HTML from the excerpts though (meta descriptions)? I put some images in there to display on the frontpage etc. But for description tags they’re not really useful. And maybe an option to generate excerpts of the full article even if there are already excerpts entered?
gia • 14 years ago

thanks for the plugins, but I found a mistake in writing the script. try this clay http://googlegalaxy.co.cc/news_sitemap.xml, maybe you can fix it. :)
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  What kind of error did you get in the backend? There’s no file there, maybe there are no write rights for that folder?
  - gia • 14 years ago
    
    ok!!!!……and now i have problem, look this “XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
    Location: http://googlegalaxy.co.cc/news_sitemap.xml
    Line Number 144, Column 30:”. you can help me????:(
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
      
      Looks like it didn’t finish generating… Can you regenerate it?
      
      gia • 14 years ago
      
      ok …!!!!! Thank you sir, and now it runs well
Chuck Reynolds • 14 years ago

Thx for the update…

Looking to have a custom HOME title tag option somewhere… Not always is my general settings title what needs to be in the header AND title tag in header.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  The home title option is on the titles settings page already :)
Rednights • 14 years ago

I can’t wait when it’s stable, looking forward to it!
Cliff • 14 years ago

I received an error message after download, went to setting and received this :

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

did I do something wrong?
- Cliff • 14 years ago
  
  Sorry guys it;s working false alarm..
Simon • 14 years ago

Question about the video module: for those of us that host our videos on YouTube, will the video module be useful to us?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  No… There’s currently no way to have your video’s hosted on Youtube and rank in organic search with your own site. This does work for other video sites… Unfair, I know.
  - Rezdwan Hamid • 14 years ago
    
    Hello Yoast. I’ve been keeping tabs on this new plugin especially the video SEO feature. I’m not sure how it works for your plugin but another plugin that I saw is able to create a video XML sitemap for blog posts with YouTube videos embedded.
    
    Google XML Sitemap for Videos
    
    I’m not that technically inclined and was wondering if you can elaborate on the differences?
Wil • 14 years ago

hi, just installed , but i’ve an issue with special char, é & etc
Jim Gaudet • 14 years ago

Wow, that update was fast. I keep updated on the XML issue, thanks.
Franklin • 14 years ago

Is this meant to replace the all in one seo plugin or compliment it?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 14 years ago
  
  Replace. Entirely.
chris • 14 years ago

cant wait for the video and local modules
Illiya Vjestica • 14 years ago

Joost De Valk you sir are a godsend! I’ve been listening to you on the WordPress Community podcast and before on Press This for a long time now, this was after I had gotten to know you more as a blogger and WordPress expert having heard you speak at Think Visibility.

I’ve been using the All in One SEO plugin for an age now and on numerous WordPress sites, I heard your thoughts about it on the podcast which made me re-look at the plugin. With All in One SEO I switched it off to NOT to auto-generate meta descriptions but it still does, I’m constantly seeing my SERPs and looking at the description thinking…hey that’s not what I wanted to put! Well enough is enough…

I must thank Nathan Rice of StudioPress for his SEO Data Transporter plugin, I will wait for the update to his plugin so I can move across to your SEO plugin Joost.

I had begun the process of manually entering all my title tags & meta descriptions into a spreadsheet for the inevitable switch over and you guys are real life savers, I now don’t have to endure that pain so thank you.
Tyler • 14 years ago

Downloading now. Looking forward to installing…
Emil Uzelac • 14 years ago

Just downloaded and I will give it a try.

Thanks,
Emil