Comments on: Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Indexing Control

By: benjamin m.

benjamin m. — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:11:46 +0000

Hello,

If I want that search engine index only one category (in my case the category “musique” for all playlist) what I need to change in the code ? thanks

By: johan

johan — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:42:30 +0000

Hi! Your code is great but I have come across a few problems…

First off, I have Pages for the Archive and Tag Cloud that will be indexed using this. I guess that is bad SEO? Is there any way to exclude certain Pages like these?

Also, Pages made using Page Templates are “empty” and thus will lack description.

Is there any good solutions? Sorry if this is really simple stuff, but I don’t know php so well.

By: Rich Staats

Rich Staats — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:36:54 +0000

is this the same as using a robots.txt file at the root? And if you use this, is it okay to still use the robot.txt file?

By: sammy

sammy — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:20:22 +0000

While viewing your source I noticed that you don’t seem to have any plugin-generated meta information. It seems as if you manually entered the meta tag information on every single page you have on your site. And also because I use a plugin (platinum SEO), the meta information in the head section yes, but it’s toward the lower end of the head tag while your meta information is in the upper end of the head section right next to the title tag. How can I move up my meta information up in the head area and how can I build my meta on individual posts and pages without relying on a plugin? Thanks.

By: Five Free SEO WordPress Themes in Five Days :: Christopher Ross

Five Free SEO WordPress Themes in Five Days :: Christopher Ross — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:57:31 +0000

[...] to subscribe to my RSS feed or leave a comment.After reading a great series by Nathan Rice on the setup of WordPress for search engine optimization I’ve decided to spend next week developing a series of freemium WordPress templates for [...]

By: Nathan Rice

Nathan Rice — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:42:52 +0000

@Guy,
Sure you can, but I disagree with you. These kinds of changes are not things that plugins should be responsible for doing. Code changes that will change the way your site interfaces with search engines should be handled by the theme, not a plugin.

And you mentioned upgrading … I agree, it’s a risk. But think about what happens if the All in One SEO pack becomes incompatible with a future WordPress release. At least now you know how to do think kind of thing manually, so you’re not 100% dependent on a plugin for your SEO.

By: Guy

Guy — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:24:18 +0000

Can I suggest the All In One SEO plugin- this does the same thing without having to go into the code (which will be wiped out if you update your theme), and you have a nice GUI for the options.

By: Peter A. Mello

Peter A. Mello — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:30:28 +0000

Thanks!
I’m subscribed and looking forward to learning more.
Thanks again for sharing.

By: Nathan Rice

Nathan Rice — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:28:58 +0000

@Chris,
One small note, after visiting your site, I’m noticing that my syntax highlighter tends to add a space between the < and ?php when I post PHP code. Be sure to remove that space or the code won’t work.

Nathan

By: Nathan Rice

Nathan Rice — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:26:17 +0000

@Chris,
You bet! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

By: Chris Ross

Chris Ross — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:22:14 +0000

Wow, thanks! I’ve been doing this through a far more complicated method for months now, I really appreciate you posting this.

By: Nathan Rice

Nathan Rice — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:47:25 +0000

@Peter A. Mello: Not exactly … but it does need to be between the and tags. In most themes, you could probably just add the following code to your functions.php file between the opening and closing PHP tags:

function index_the_right_stuff() {
if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()) {echo '';} else {echo ''; } }
add_action('wp_head','index_the_right_stuff');

This adds the code using a function that will output the code in your header.php through the wp_head hook.

By: Peter A. Mello

Peter A. Mello — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:35:06 +0000

Great stuff.
If there a precise place the above tag needs to be in header.php?
Thanks for sharing!

By: Nathan Rice

Nathan Rice — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:19:37 +0000

@IndieLab, This, and every other SEO theme feature we'll mention in this series, is included with my Premium WordPress theme, Proximity News.

By: IndieLab

IndieLab — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:16:22 +0000

This is great information Nathan. It seems to me that any theme developers would want to include this bit of code in their theme header.php files and then call that out in the theme’s feature list, but I haven’t ever seen anyone do that.