If you use Wordpress and the excellent aLinks plugin, you may notice that each link it inserts in a post has a PHPSESSID parameter tagged on the end – a PHP Session ID – which then gets indexed within SERPS. Now I’m not sure what impact this has on search engine positions to be honest, but it looks messy.
So the way to remove PHP Session ID’s is as follows. If you go Read the rest of this entry »
If you find your Wordpress admin is running real slow and you use the aLinks plugin, chances are it’s this that’s the problem. In fact the same might apply to other plugins, but you can check by de-activating the plugin(s) and see what the effect is. Anyway, here’s the solution…
aLinks checks the authors website at Headzoo for updates every time you call a page in wp-admin. If the Headzoo site is down or slow, this causes a knock-on effect. The simple and easy way to solve this is Read the rest of this entry »
I recently upgraded a couple of Wordpress blogs to 2.61 and had an issue with aLinks. Well, two issues in fact. The first one was that it wasn’t linking keyphrases in pages – it was OK in posts but not pages for some reason. A colleague of mine came up with the cause and a workaround, but aLinks needs fixing by the developer. Until such a time…
The issue was with “captions” on photos. For some reason when adding a caption to a photo on a Wordpress page, aLinks didn’t link phrases. However, by double-spacing the words in the caption it mysteriously started working Read the rest of this entry »
moreI had a problem in Wordpress where in a category listing, the “previous” and “forward” links were returning a 404 error. I am using custom permalinks (/%category%/%postname%) and just couldn’t get it to work. Tried all sorts of fixes recommended at various places, but none seemed to fix it and I didn’t want to change the permalinks because the pages are in Google already and changing them would break the links.
However, I found a simple plugin from Doug Smith that sorts this known bug out:
http://barefootdevelopment.blogspot.com/2007/11/fix-for-wordpress-paging-problem.html
Cheers Doug 
I’ve played with a few SEO plugins for Wordpress, and up until I installed Wordpess 2.61 I was using “SEO Title Tag” and “SEO Post Link” to do my dirty work, and they did it pretty well. These plugins added fields to each post, allowed you to reword the slugs to be more search engine friendly, and redefine the META tags for posts and pages, but stopped short of doing categories and archives.
However, when I installed 2.61, I discovered a plugin called “Headspace” which not only did what SEO Title Tag does, but provided a much better GUI in so much as that apart from including the extra fields in each post, it also provides a “quick edit” function for categories, archives, tags, the homepage and the generic parts of the blog. And it’s superb.
There are a couple of minor drawbacks to this Headspace plugin however. Firstly, the quick edit GUI Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things you have to be careful about with Wordpress is picking a theme that doesn’t damage your search engine rankings. There’s a couple of things in particular to watch for.
Firstly, many free themes are provided with the condition that you leave the footer links intact. Trouble is, a lot of these link to sites in “bad neighbourhoods” – that is, sites that Google has banned, penalise or regard as junk. If you want to rank well and quickly, you don’t want a theme with shite links all over it. It’s worth paying for a premium theme or offering to pay the author for removal of the links. Some themes have “malicious” code embedded that add links or do stuff you don’t want. Be careful!
The second thing that is a problem is the way the header is constructed. Quite often developers embed an H1 and H2 tag in the header which is quite legitimate – usually for Read the rest of this entry »