Plugin features

Hello! Thanks 🙂

Thank you for the questions; we get them a lot because other SEO plugin authors don’t always appear to know what they’re doing, so it’s good to have these in one place.

1. No, TSF doesn’t emit a Last-Modified header. This is something only used for cache invalidation, not for SEO. I understand how this could be a valuable indicator; however, in SEO, we use structured data (like Schema.org).
2. Alt tags are handled by WordPress natively. These tags are not as much for SEO as accessibility, and the tag isn’t always helpful. Still, you can manually fill it in when editing the image in the WordPress library or otherwise use an AI plugin. That said, for SEO purposes, it’s unnecessary because Google also scans images for their content. To prove this, search for “SEO framework birds,” and you’ll find all our images with birds in them, none of which have been manually marked to have birds. Bing, on the other hand, doesn’t scan images. Nevertheless, people who require accessibility features like alt-tags also have the same AI tools at their disposal, and it’s much more environmentally friendly to only read out the image’s contents when there’s an actual demand, and then specifically so according to the visitor’s preferences.
3. Managing links in comments are WordPress and the theme’s job. This isn’t necessary for SEO plugins; WordPress already marks those links as “user-generated content” or, at least, “do not follow.” Also, the method you’re describing wastes resources because visitors must decode URLs repeatedly. Search engines can read JavaScript-only sites, so they will decode and may still follow those URLs when spotted: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics.
4. See above.
5. TSF has a feature to stop paginated indexing at its Robots Meta Settings. However, this is turned off by default because it hampers link discoverability: If a page is marked with noindex, the page and its links will disappear from search engine databases and old pages may no longer be discovered. Search engines understand and will group paginated URLs; those should never outrank your pages. Still, I recommend not having all archives indexed, for that will increase the time it takes to discover new pages because search engines have a lot more to crawl on your site.
6. TSF is unique in only using canonical links actually registered with your WordPress installation. Therefore, it is the only plugin fully resistant to unintentional duplicated content. Keep Advanced Query Protection enabled to prevent registered endpoints of WordPress and plugins from being indexed when they’re malformed.
7. TSF automatically applies noindex to Attachment Pages (bugged in WP 6.4, so keep this enabled), Date, and Search archives. You can manually enable it for many other archives registered by WordPress and plugins.
8. TSF rectifies faulty paginated URLs for pages, the home page, blogs, and other archives. So, TSF will never link to a non-existing paginated page. Instead, it will link back to the original page if one accidentally lands on a pagination-overflown page.
9. TSF doesn’t need to remove the ?replytocom-link, nor should you: that link has accessibility purposes. Since that link isn’t registered with WordPress’s Rewrite API (nor the “public query vars”), TSF will correctly assume the original page’s canonical URL from a ?replytocom-link and steer bots back to that. Moreover, ?replytocom-links are automatically marked with nofollow by WordPress, so bots shouldn’t engage with them in the first place. TSF also automatically blocks the indexing of comment pagination; those are indeed registered with the Rewrite APIs.

That’s all of them. Let me know if you have any more questions; I’d happily answer them. Cheers!

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Sybre Waaijer. Reason: formatting