After having to fix a bug in the Wordpress Subdomains plugin so that All in One SEO would work, I decided it would be a good time to install it on my live site and see if there are any other issues I could see. So far it’s been pretty good, but it did raise some further questions about how SEO compatible the plugin is. This is where I need input from other people because I’m no expert on this.
First up is a feature I added last release (0.6.0). It basically kept links to normal Wordpress Pages on the Category or Author Subdomain being browsed. I did this mainly so that the person viewing one of your subdomains doesn’t get thrown back to the main site when they choose one of these pages. I did wonder if this would be seen as duplicate content by search engines and therefore be bad for SEO. Adam Dempsey felt the same, so I posted details of how to turn it off. I’ve made it optional in the next version (0.6.1 – in testing now) where it’s default state is off.
Maybe one solution to this would be to have these pages be set to ‘noindex’ when viewed on a subdomain so that search engines leave them be. I’ve not had a chance to look into how I’d do this yet.
Next up is how to deal with the root page of Category Subdomains. One of the options of the All in One SEO plugin is to set noindex on Categories Archives. This is to combat the problem of duplicate content, however when you turn this on it means that the root page of a Category Subdomain will be marked noindex and wont appear on search engine searches. This should not affect your content as it should all be linked from your main site which will still be indexed. That is except for Pages that you have tied to specific categories.
For this reason the next version will include a new custom field for pages that will have links for them appearing in page lists (widgets, etc) on your main site. I’ve done this with my Projects page which is tied to the Web Development subdomain, but I wanted it to be linked from main page as the Web Development subdomain main page is not indexed.
The question is, is this the best way to do this from an SEO point of view and what if you want your subdomain root pages to appear on the search engine?
I’d also be interested to know people opinions on the how the plugin handles SEO in other ways. What does it do wrong? What could be improved?
I look forward to hearing from you.
WP Subdomains 0.6.1 is in testing on this site and will be released soon.
So far I just spotted one bug. If you’re using the Date Archive filtering and you are on a Subdmain Category it may get the wrong count for the month. This happens if a post is linked to more than one category in that subdomain’s heirarchy (i.e that category and any of it’s children).
Apart from that, Adam Dempsey (one of the previous authors of this plugin) confirmed something that I suspected. The feature I added to keep links to pages on the subdomain you’re viewing could be bad in terms of SEO. I’ve decided I will release an update in the next few days to make this a configurable option. However if you want rid of it now then:
- Open plugin/filters.php
- Go to the function named wps_page_link( $link, $id )
- Look for the line $link = $wps_this_subdomain->changePostLink( $link );
- Remove or comment it out
- Save the file
That’s all for now. Anyone else spots anything then let me know.
Just to let you know that Wordpress Subdomains 0.6.0 is released.
Sorry for the delay. I wanted to release this some time ago, but I kept adding new features, and then the end of term exams and my holiday got in the way.
New Features:
- Add author subdomains
- Turn this on and http://alex.mydomain.com will show all the posts written by alex. Just like going to http://www.mydomain.com/author/alex.
- Keep links to non-subdomain pages that are not tied to a category on the subdomain we’re viewing
- For example if you have an about page, and you’re on the http://movies.mydomain.com subdomain. Then the link to about will be http://movies.mydomain.com/about, therefore keeping the reader from being bounced back to the main site.
- Date Archive filter
- let you choose to have date archives filtered down to the category or author of the subdomain you’re on. Will also show the correct count in the date archive widget.
- Added plugin settings options to turn on/off:
- All Plugin Functionality
- Date Archive Filter
- Page Subdomains
- Author Subdomains
- Display warning and disable plugin if no permalinks setup
- Should cut about 50% of the calls for help I get.
- Support permalinks with %category% in
- Much needed for all the people who use /%category%/%postname% or similar permalinks. I don’t use this permalink on this site so I’m relying on these users to let me know if there are any bugs in this I missed.
- Custom Link title for Category Subdomains
- Lets you pick a custom title to appear as the link text to the category instead of the category name.
No major bugfixes apart from one that made the All in One SEO plugin not work correctly. There are various code improvements where I realised there were wordpress functions I could use for things I was trying to do.
For all the people asking for help. I will get to you, but right now I’m relaxing in Thailand, so you’ll need to be patient. I will also be creating a proper HOWTO which should hopefully make things a little easier.
Related Pages:
The plugin has been uploaded to this site for some testing. Really this just checks that the features that I use aren’t broken, but I’ve tested the other features quite extensively on my development site.
If nothing breaks in the next 24 hours I’ll be releasing it.
Ok, sorry for lack of updates but I’ve been quite enjoying my holiday. Anyway, on the flight to Malaysia a few days back I hacked in the last few updates for this release. I just need to do some testing on my development site and then stick it live on this site for 24 hours to check all is ok. Once that is done I will make the release.
Also I’ve decided it’s no longer going to be 0.5.3 but 0.6.0. Thrilling stuff hey.
I didn’t quite get all the new features in I’d planned. The main one being the ability to remove the category base from category urls (e.g. http://travels.mydomain.com/category/china to http://travels.mydomain.com/china). The reason for this is because the code to make the plugin compatible with permalinks with %category% in led to a number of changes in the URL rewrite code. The category base removal would also produce a number of changes. I wanted to make sure the first set of changes were all good and safe before making the second to save confusion over where the problem lies should there be one.
The changes that will be in 0.6.0 are:
- Add author subdomains
- Turn this on and http://alex.mydomain.com will show all the posts written by alex. Just like going to http://www.mydomain.com/author/alex.
- Keep links to non-subdomain pages that are not tied to a category on the subdomain we’re viewing
- For example if you have an about page, and you’re on the http://movies.mydomain.com subdomain. Then the link to about will be http://movies.mydomain.com/about, therefore keeping the reader from being bounced back to the main site.
- Date Archive filter
- let you choose to have date archives filtered down to the category or author of the subdomain you’re on. Will also show the correct count in the date archive widget.
- Added plugin settings options to turn on/off:
- All Plugin Functionality
- Date Archive Filter
- Page Subdomains
- Author Subdomains
- Display warning and disable plugin if no permalinks setup
- Should cut about 50% of the calls for help I get.
- Support permalinks with %category% in
- Much needed for all the people who use /%category%/%postname or similar permalinks. I don’t use this permalink on this site so I’m relying on these users to let me know if there are any bugs in this I missed.
- Custom Link title for Category Subdomains
- Lets you pick a custom title to appear as the link text to the category instead of the category name. One particular user should be happy with this one.
I can’t make any promises when this will be out because I need to find the time to give it a thorough test and upload it to this site. However, I expect it will be done within the next week if not sooner.
