Why should I cloak my affiliate links?

If you search online for it, there are tons of reasons for people to redirect their affiliate links. The “historical” reason for cloaking affiliate links is hiding that you’re an affiliate for the search engines. Now I’m not one to think the search engines are stupid enough to be fooled by an easy script like the one I’m providing below, but there are more reasons. The funny thing is that it’s called cloaking affiliate links because of that history, but I digress. Let me give you the three reasons why I do it and why I think every affiliate should be cloaking their affiliate links:

1. Ease of management
   You sometimes have to change your affiliate links. If you have to change them in more than one place, it’s bound to be a painful exercise, so you want to centralize management.
2. Prevent leaking PageRank to advertisers
   While sometimes you might want to “hide” for a search engine that you’re an affiliate, for  me the reasoning is actually the other way around. Affiliate links are ads, and those should be nofollowed or otherwise prevented from leaking PageRank to the advertiser. Instead of nofollowing each and every link, which is painful and you’re bound to forget at some point, why not make sure search engines can’t follow the link at all?
3. “Clean” links
   It might be obvious when you’re linking to Amazon that the link points to Amazon, but when I link to say, Genesis, using my affiliate link, the link would point to shareasale.com, which in turn would redirect to Genesis. So the URL of the link would be ugly and wouldn’t tell you where you’re going to. Instead, my “clean”, cloaked version of that affiliate link reads:http://yoast.com/out/genesis/That is a lot more telling about the destination isn’t it? I think it’s more user friendly.

Cloaking affiliate links, the how to

The basic process of cloaking affiliate links is simple:

1. Create a folder from where you’ll serve your redirects, I use /out/.
2. Block the /out/ folder in your domains robots.txt file by adding:

   Disallow: /out/

3. Use a script in your redirect folder to redirect to your affiliate URLs.

Step 2 makes sure search engines won’t follow the redirects, but we’ll add some extra safety with our script. Step 3 could be as easy as writing each redirect in your redirect directory’s .htaccess file manually. I personally prefer something that’s a bit easier to manage, which is why I’m giving you a little redirect script I wrote below. As a bonus, this should be easier to get working on NGINX too.

Affiliate link redirect script

This script consists of three parts. The index.php file is the file that handles the actual redirects, it does a 302 redirect and sends an X-Robots-Tag header along, which makes sure the search engines that obey those headers aren’t allowed to index or follow the URL, should you forget the robots.txt exclusion.

The redirects.txt file is a comma separated file with a very simple format:

name,destination-url

For instance:

yoast,http://yoast.com

It should always have the first line:

default,http://example.com

Where you can change example.com to your domain. This will make sure that people who try to redirect to non-existing redirects get redirected to your homepage.

If you install these two files, the script will already work. With the above setup, going to /out/?id=yoast on your server would redirect you to http://yoast.com.

Now I’m a bit of a URL freak and I actually like my URLs even cleaner than that, so there’s a bit of .htaccess involved as well. It’s only 5 lines and basically makes sure that you can link to /out/yoast and that would redirect you as well. This has the added bonus of preventing people from opening your redirects.txt file, so they can’t check out all your redirects.

Neat huh? You can download the files here, or view their source here. If you run NGINX, this gist contains some sample code for how to make that work.

Let me know in the comments if and when you use it and whether you run into any issues.

Note: I’d written about this topic in the past, specifically how to do it with WordPress plugins, the Analytics bit of that post might still be very useful.

How to cloak your affiliate links is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

New developer

Recently there were some unfortunate events in the US which caused BlueGlass, a company lots of my friends worked at, to go bust. As with all negatives, there was a good thing that came out of this, as I was able to hire Linh Pham, one of their incredible developers. He’s now come on board full time as a remote worker to fix bugs and develop new functionality across all our free and premium plugins. You’ll probably see him on github if you decide to become active there.

Roadmap

I have many, many ideas for WordPress SEO. I’m slowly speccing these ideas as Issues in github, where you will currently find an 1.6 milestone and a 2.0 milestone. WordPress SEO 1.6 will contain a lot of bugfixes and some smaller enhancements, combined with one bigger new feature: a wpseo_sitemap shortcode that generates an HTML sitemap.

The 2.0 branch already contains a first stab at Google Webmaster Tools integration, allowing for:

• Easy website verification.
• Verified submission of the XML index sitemap.
• Retrieval of crawl errors.

I’m very excited about the potential of that new feature.

Internationalization

This is probably a good time to remind you that if you want to become active in the internationalization of the WordPress SEO plugin, we have a fully functioning GlotPress install on translate.yoast.com. You can register here if you want to help translate. The internationalization for all our plugins, both free and premium is managed by the awesome Remkus de Vries. We currently have 382 registered translators, of which more than half have actually been active in translating, but we can always use more active translators.

As a thank you, for our premium plugins you can get a free single license of a plugin if you translate the plugin into a new language.

Patches welcome!

I have taken the freedom to look at how the Easy Digital Downloads github community is set up and basically copied, pasted and modified some of what they did, resulting in most notably our new contribution guide. But what I really want to say is, we really welcome your pull requests!

I’m very excited about this change and hope it means more people will dive in and help us improve what’s already the most advanced WordPress SEO plugin available today!

WordPress SEO Community & Roadmap is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

We gave it our best shot though, we used bbPress, combined it with several of Pippin’s fantastic plugins and used the EDD Product Support extension from the great guys at Webdevstudios. While these are all well built and stable plugins, I kept adding more plugins to fix tiny annoyances with bbPress, at some point I had 25 plugins running to make the forums “workable” for us.

Having support forums also meant forcing everyone to create an account at checkout. Something I found very disturbing myself and which lead to support issues on its own, with people not receiving emails or not being able to log in. We didn’t force them to make an account because it was easier for them, we thought it was easier for us. It wasn’t, but the entire premise was wrong there.

The alternative

At the same time, we also used HelpScout. Now if you’ve been following me on Twitter for a while, you might have seen me sing their praises. They have really changed the way I look at doing customer support and their blog continuously induces Thijs, who handles most of our support, and myself to, well, just do support better.

When comparing threads in the forums with threads in HelpScout, we found that people were happier when they got personalized email and we actually spent significantly less time answering questions through HelpScout than on the forums. And then came an even bigger improvement.

I’d been emailing with Nick Francis, the CEO there, from the very beginning since we started using HelpScout. He had mentioned they were going to do custom apps and I decided to chase them a bit on that. We got into the beta and within about an hour I had build a custom app that connects to Easy Digital Downloads and shows us, within the HelpScout interface, all the transactions for a user, their license keys, payment methods etc. It also has a button to check the payment at the payment provider and to re-send the purchase email for a purchase.

Where our average time per question had been 5 to 7 minutes, having all of our clients info easily at hand right in the HelpScout sidebar dropped that to 1.5 minutes. Forum threads were now taking more than 7 times longer and our client response times were much better on HelpScout. So we shut down the forums. We went through every thread and emailed every user with an answer, deleting threads one by one. Took us a couple of hours, but we’re very glad we did it.

You see, for us, HelpScout is an interface, for the client, it’s just email. No need for them to make an account to get support from us. That’s how it should be and that’s why we’re sticking with all email support. Would love to know what you all think!

Why we moved to all email support is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So I went and installed and played with a ton of SEO plugins. My conclusion: hardly any of the new ones are original or truly add value, but they all promise heaven. The more well known free SEO plugins, including my own, have mostly overlapping feature sets, with some of them having features that others lack completely, and code quality varying highly. Some WordPress hosting companies complain about SEO plugins in general, having seen quite a few of them now I understand at least where they got the idea that SEO plugins are slow. I guess the burden is on me to show that my WordPress SEO plugin doesn’t suffer from that slowness.

Luckily, I know some hosts make people move over from other plugins to mine, and I know for a fact that this migration guide on my blog is highly visited because people get complaints from their host about All in One SEO using too much resources and wanting them to move to my WordPress SEO plugin. Some other people still swear by AIOSEO though, which is, of course, fine: to each his own.

Squirrly

I was truly in shock when I saw some of the newer kids on the block though. Squirrly, notably, posted about the best WordPress SEO plugins two days back and wrote:

It should, first of all, be all white-hat and be up to date with the updates that came up post Panda and Penguin (Yoast and SeoPressor for example, are outdated from this point of view).

That’s quite a bold statement to make. When I asked them on Twitter to back up their statement, as it’s close to libel in my opinion, they didn’t really come up with a suitable answer, instead referring to my page analysis functionality recommending 300 words whereas “only 80 where necessary for Google News”.

It’s obvious what the difference is between me and them, just from that statement alone: I don’t just read Google’s guidelines, I actually optimize content and I know that you need a certain bit of content in a post to be able to rank well, even in Google news. How I know? Well I’ve worked with some of the biggest newspapers in the world to optimize their content, in fact, I’m currently working on a project for the Guardian involving a lot of Google news optimization. When asked, they couldn’t tell me what they are basing their analytics on, instead answering me with this:

@yoast SEOs usually don’t agree. to this, I hope you can agree :)

— Squirrly SEO Plugin (@SquirrlyHQ) April 6, 2013

But… Of course, I had to look at their plugin. Seems they’ve built a snippet preview (how original, it’s not like I didn’t add that to my SEO plugin like 2 years ago):

It doesn’t even match the look of Google’s search results even in how it looks, second, it doesn’t highlight the target keyword, which they make you put in. Funnily enough, they then do a kind of analysis on your content that looks remarkably similar to what my WordPress SEO plugin does:

The difference between that plugin and mine is that they do this “live”, which is something I’ve been pondering for a while, but the way they do it is by sending all of your data to their server all the time. Now, if they did something on their server that added value, that’d be cool, but they don’t. And after 14 days of doing this for you, they make you pay for the pleasure of doing this. Now you can get the same kind of analysis, for free, by using my WordPress SEO plugin. As far as I know, only Copyblogger’s Scribe actually adds value in what they do by sending stuff to their server, this, on the other hand, is pure nonsense.

The plugin also adds an XML sitemap. Funnily enough, you’d think that if they want to sell something they’d at least have feature parity with what the free plugins do. But their XML sitemap doesn’t even contain custom post types, nor does it support images in the XML sitemap, both standard features in my plugin.

Lastly, they offer the option to add a favicon and apple icon (remember this free plugin? you might not, it’s 5 years old).

All in all, they’re trying to use a funny looking squirrel to sell something that not just my SEO plugin but several other free WordPress SEO plugins can do for you and do better. The most shocking thing? They’ve actually gotten funding, which shows you that some people will fund anything without doing research.

This is obviously not the future, so what is?

I have a whole lot of features planned for my SEO plugin, some of which I plan to add to the free core plugin, some of which will probably be more niche and I will therefore make into premium extensions, like my Video SEO and Local SEO plugins.

Scribe has been taking great steps and been adding more and more features that actually help people optimize their content properly. SEO Ultimate has some features I think people will like a lot, and though I’d implement them differently, I very much welcome competition like that: it forces all of us to move forward.

I’m looking forward to making it easier to optimize websites technically and to optimize content, as well as keep up with all the new things Google, Bing and other search engines put out there. The future of SEO is in integrating it more into all the other stuff we do, that’s exactly what my plugin aims to do.

Would love to hear what you think should be in the future of SEO plugins!

The future of SEO plugins for WordPress is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Well, this time, it’s not our fault… Google does all sorts of things to your title. It sometimes replaces it with parts of your URL, but it’s also known to add the brand to the end of your title, or just completely rewrite it when it feels like it.

In its help doc about titles and descriptions, Google says the following:

If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.

So… Basically, Google says: we know better, you can try and write a title we like, but we reserve to do whatever to make people click on your result.

There is no way to prevent this from happening right now. Which is annoying in many ways, but not something we can help, sorry. If you’re mad about it, or find it annoying, tweet to @mattcutts, maybe he’ll do something about it. In the past Google sometimes used the open directory projects title for a page instead of the page title, and there was a <meta name="robots" content="noodp"/> tag to prevent this from happening. I’d love to see something similar for this, but it’s not there yet.

But…. What we do learn from this.

Write proper page titles. Not overly optimized titles targeting a gazillion keywords. No. Proper, one sentence titles that contain your brand name and your focus keyword. It’s not hard, just do it. And for your homepage your title should probably start with your brand name, 50% of the emails we get is about homepages where people have ridiculously optimized titles instead of just the name of their company.

Which is probably also why we won’t get something similar to NOODP anymore. We’ve broken the usability of the web, Google is trying to fix it for its users.

Why Google won’t display the right page title is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Previously this site had been hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server, which was rock solid as this site grew to almost a million pageviews per month. VPS.net is fast, affordable, provides good support, and I continue to recommend them.

But there are features of Synthesis that I realized I could no longer live without.

Optimized WordPress Performance

First, I don’t want to do my own Linux optimization anymore. Now I won’t have to.

The Synthesis team developed its Linux server stack specifically to handle high traffic loads on WordPress websites. They have spent the last several years tweaking and perfecting this setup to provide the outstanding performance, reliability, and security that Synthesis does today.

Simply put, the Synthesis team knows WordPress and they know server performance. I wanted to align with a team that understands WordPress performance better than I do. Now I have.

Theme Support

The second reason for the switch is that Synthesis, as part of Copyblogger, can simultaneously support my hosting and my theme.

Yoast.com runs on the Genesis Framework, developed by Copyblogger’s StudioPress design team. Yes, I could host Yoast.com anywhere and still have access to StudioPress support, but no other hosting platform is specifically tuned for Genesis. This further optimizes performance and security, and it makes updates a breeze.

Plus, the Synthesis support staff is proactive about troubleshooting and quickly fixing issues specific to Genesis. A support question that might have taken two or three tickets to answer previously now will take just one because of the Synthesis/Genesis integration.

Cutting Edge Value

Copyblogger Media hosts its own business websites on regular plans from Synthesis. Beyond performance, Synthesis was designed to support the operational needs of the site owner versus that of the hosting company, and thus provides a few features that are unique among hosting providers.

Operations

First, Synthesis provides their customers with an uptime checker called Site Sensor.

Beyond normal uptime checks, it can actually perform WordPress-specific checks which ensure RSS feeds and sitemaps are current. A website with broken SEO and content distribution mechanics might as well be down. The sitemap checker even supports the indexed sitemaps produced by our own WordPress SEO plugin, I worked with the Synthesis team to add that functionality.

Second, Synthesis has backups down to a science.

Synthesis already backs up my server on a nightly basis and ships it across the U.S. to a second data center. They also make local WordPress-specific backups that make it easy for their support staff to replace plugins, WP options settings, and more at a moment’s notice. Beyond this, they provide a database snapshot tool that I can use to back up my database before plugin and WP upgrades.

Additionally, they are soon releasing a feature called Personal Backups for S3 that will allow me to send a backup to my own S3 bucket at Amazon. Unlike normal backup plugins, this service is actually driven by robust server-side processes and is not dependent on PHP.

Site Speed

Finally, I switched to Synthesis because I trust their technical aptitude and respect their forward-thinking mindset.

For example, some of you may have heard about SPDY, Google’s initiative to speed up the web by improving HTTP and TCP. I certainly have, and it is a feature I wanted implemented on our HTTPS forums and checkout pages.

With this move to Synthesis, I’ll have it.

SPDY requires server-side and browser support. (For a list of compatible web browsers, click here.) Synthesis is one of the first WordPress-only hosts to offer SPDY compatibility for qualified sites, having already tested it on a few of their own most valuable properties.

This is just the latest example of Synthesis consistently evolving to provide more value for its customers’ hosting dollar.

A True Partner

In Synthesis, I don’t see a hosting provider. I see a hosting partner. This is what I needed as Yoast.com continues to grow and evolve.

I’ll now have more time to spend doing what I love — writing plugins, reviewing websites, even writing Genesis child themes — while the Synthesis team will make sure that the site is up and ready to take advantage of the next development in WordPress hosting.

Why I Switched to Copyblogger’s Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

When I started Yoast, then called Altha, it was just me, doing web development for a few clients here and there. It was a side job to my consulting jobs at online marketing agencies. My WordPress plugins were just a hobby and not something I thought I could ever make a living from. In 2010 I decided I was going to go solo, leaving my agency and doing consultancy for less clients, but more intensively.

Doing this freed up time to do more development and do product development. I found myself doing more and more one-off reviews of websites, people just needing a good critique of what they were doing and a list of things they should improve. This evolved into what is now our website review service and a very large chunk of our business. The good thing about that is that it doesn’t require me to go off-site, we can do it all from within our office here and I can spend a lot more time on research & development that way, figuring out how to further optimize people’s websites.

Last year I decided I’d start to sell premium plugins, with our Video SEO plugin being the first premium offering and this has gone amazingly well. So much so that I hired my brother Thijs to assist in support. Last week we launched our second premium plugin, Local SEO, which I built together with Arjan. It’s doing great so far and we’re happy with the feedback we’re getting, which is pretty exciting.

Firing clients

The combination of website reviews and premium plugins means I have less and less time to actually spend on consulting face-to-face with clients. I kept telling myself that my consulting clients were where I got new ideas for products and I thus needed to keeping doing that consulting. But that’s not true, I was just looking for an excuse. My consulting clients are all big online companies whereas our products are aimed at publishers, SME’s and their online marketing agencies mostly… In fact, the truly good new ideas for products are coming from our website reviews, because we’re selling those to exactly the SME’s we’re targeting our other products at.

What I will keep doing is training people, in our Dutch office, because in talking with them and in finding problems that people have when they make their first SEO steps or when they “grow” in their SEO expertise, that’s where I learn too. That’s a good “breeding ground” for other stuff. SEO strategy consulting for large online brands… Not so much.

Because of this, in the last few days, I’ve gone through a very weird process: I’ve been “firing” some of my remaining clients. I’ll keep a few consulting clients around because they’re too interesting, I’m doing an awesome project at the Guardian for instance, which really is teaching me new things about publishing, the web in general and SEO specifically. But most of my other clients will have to find another “home”. Luckily I’ve got a lot of good friends in the industry who can pick up where I’m leaving in a great way and with more time and enthusiasm than I can at this point.

I’ll keep some room in my agenda for 3 – 4 consulting clients a year, those will be reserved for major online publishers specifically as that’s where I feel I can make a difference and learn a lot at the same time (you can apply here, though there’s only 1 spot left for this year). People that approach me for other work I’ll start saying no to and, if possible, refer them to industry friends.

What’s next?

With that behind me, I’ve got more time to focus on our existing site review and premium plugin business and on new products. We’ve got more cool stuff lined up: two more premium add-ons to WordPress SEO are slowly being specced and developed and we’re also going to go in a “new” direction, by releasing our first child-theme in a month or two. It’s going to be aimed at a very specific market and I’m very curious how it’ll pan out. It’ll be a Genesis child-theme, because I don’t really see a need to develop a new framework when there’s something as good as that out there already and I love working with the Copyblogger family.

The direction is clear though: we develop products aimed at SME’s, publishers and their SEO / online marketing agencies to help them build & optimize their websites.

On focus, and how we’re slowly changing our business model is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 41 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn’t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site’s overall robots.txt error rate is 7.0%

HTTP status codes and search engines

A search engine constantly verifies whether content it’s linking to stille exist and hasn’t changed.  It verifies two things:

1. is the content still being served with the correct HTTP status code (HTTP 200);
2. is it still the same content.

An HTTP 200 status code means: all is well, here is the content you asked for. It is the only correct status code for content. If content has moved, you can redirect it, either permanently, with an HTTP 301 header, or temporarily, with an HTTP 302 or 307 header.

If your server gives any other HTTP status header, it means the search engine can no longer find the content. If you server gives a 200 HTTP status code, but the page is in fact an error and says something like “File not found” or has very little content, Google will classify it as a soft 404 in Google Webmaster Tools.

There is only one proper way of telling the search engine that you’re doing site maintenance:

How server downtime works for search engines

If, during a crawl, a search engine finds that some content no longer exists, ie. it gives a 404 HTTP status, it will usually remove that content from the search results until it can come back and verify that it’s there again. If this happens often, it’ll take longer and longer for the content to come back in the search results.

What you should be doing is giving a 503 HTTP status code. This is the definition of the 503 status code from the RFC that defines these status codes:

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.

So, you have to send a 503 status code in combination with a Retry-After header. Basically you’re saying: hang on, we’re doing some maintenance, please come back in X minutes. That sounds a lot better than what a 404 error says: “Not Found”. A 404 literally means that the server can’t find anything to return for the URL that was given.

How do I send a 503 header?

In PHP the code for a 503 would be like this:

$protocol = "HTTP/1.0";
if ( "HTTP/1.1" == $_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"] )
  $protocol = "HTTP/1.1";
header( "$protocol 503 Service Unavailable", true, 503 );
header( "Retry-After: 3600" );

The delay time, 3600 in the above example, is given in seconds, so 3600 corresponds to 60 minutes. You can also specify the exact time when the visitor should come back, by sending a GMT date instead of the number of seconds. This would result in something like this:

header( "Retry-After: Fri, 19 Mar 2013 12:00:00 GMT" );

Use that with caution though, setting it to a wrong date might give unexpected results!

Our site is never down, we’re on WordPress

Nonsense. Every time you upgrade your core WordPress install, or when you’re updating plugins, WordPress will give a maintenance page. The default page sends out a proper 503 header. You can replace the default error page with a maintenance.php file in your wp-content folder, but if you do, you have to make sure that file sends out the proper 503 headers too. You can copy the code from the wp_maintenance() function.

If your database is down, WordPress actually sends an internal server error, using the dead_db() function. If you’re doing planned maintenance on your database, therefore, you’ll need to set up a custom database error message page, db-error.php in your wp-content folder that sends a proper 503 header.

Beware caches!

So where did our client go wrong?

Funnily enough, our client had properly configured 503 headers on their server. There was an issue though: they use a Varnish cache and that Varnish didn’t transfer the 503 status code correctly, it replaced it with a “general” HTTP 500 status, causing Google to send out that error email. I haven’t had a chance to test whether that is default Varnish behavior or something they broke, but it’s worth testing for your environment.

Pro tip: sending a 503 for your robots.txt

Per this post from Pierre Far of Google, if you send an HTTP 503 status code for your robots.txt, Google will halt all the crawling on your domain until it’s allowed to crawl the robots.txt again. This is actually a very useful way of preventing load on your server when doing maintenance. It still requires you to send a 503 for every URL on your server, including all static ones, but after Google has re-fetched the robots.txt it’ll probably stop hammering your server(s) for a while.

Conclusion: know what HTTP headers you’re sending

While writing this article I was reminded about a tweet quoting Vanessa Fox during last weeks SMX West:

It’s about more than number of pages crawled – you need to know about important pages & what response code they return @vanessafox #SMX

— Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) March 11, 2013

I couldn’t agree more and would add to that: at all times. Now go check those headers!

HTTP 503: Handling site maintenance correctly for SEO is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Just yesterday, during SMX West, Duane Forrester of Bing said:

most people get schema wrong – so be VERY sure you’re doing it right @duaneforrester #smx #33a

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) March 13, 2013

He’s right. We found out the hard way: Schema.org is tough to implement right. That’s why you should have us do it for you, as this plugin takes all the pain away and makes it as easy as embedding a shortcode.

In fact, I’ll tell you how we learned the hard way. We were ready to start selling this plugin almost a month ago, and then, without any notice, schema.org was updated. It added in another 80+ tags for local business… Sending us back to development.

To see all the powerful widgets and shortcodes this plugin has, check out the how-to. It allows you to easily set up a custom post type for locations too, and because we know you might have a lot of locations, we’ve also added a CSV import capability for those locations.

We’re very proud of this plugin, we hope you like it too! Go check it out now.

Local SEO made easy! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The top four reasons we hear:

#1: “my site / theme will break”

Usually followed by “and I don’t have the time to fix it”. Well, plan some time or hire someone. This week. Because if you’re on WordPress 3.1 or 3.2, it’s a matter of time before you’ll get hacked. At that time you’ll not have the luxury of “planning” the upgrade, you’ll just have to suck it up and deal with it. Prevent that from happening and upgrade.

#2: “our core modifications will be gone”

Your what? You do realize that if you were to tinker with the code of  say, Microsoft Word, Microsoft wouldn’t be helping you either? That’s exactly how it works with us. Our plugins work with WordPress, not with what you did to it. Remove your core modifications and turn them into plugins so they behave as expected by other plugins and then: update.

#3: “plugin x that we use won’t work anymore”

Well, you’ve got three options:

1. contact that plugins developer and ask him to fix it;
2. contact another developer and pay him to fix it;
3. drop the plugin and start using another plugin.

#4: “I don’t need any of the new functionality”

WordPress is updated regularly, not just to add new functionality but to fix security issues too. Frankly, most people out there, probably including you, are not able to determine whether they need new functionality. WordPress 3.4 and 3.5 added API’s for developers that plugins that you’re using might want to use, not upgrading makes those plugins function less, or not at all.

Conclusion

In short: upgrade. I know some developers out there are saying that we can’t “require” people to upgrade, well, I disagree. He compares it to Apple not forcing you to buy a new Mac when it breaks. The difference there is that we’re not talking about hardware. We’re talking about software. Apple regularly asks you to upgrade your system to fix battery issues or other issues.

In the end, it’s an economic decision: I’m not going to spend valuable support and development time on a minority that doesn’t want to upgrade, at the cost of not developing new features or fixing bugs for current versions of WordPress. So, if you want to use our plugins, stay current!

Why we don’t support old WordPress versions is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

This is the input field I’m talking about:

The focus keyword is not the meta keywords tag

This is important to note, if you think the “focus keyword” field is where you fill your meta keywords: no it’s not. I have a very specific opinion about meta keywords, which I expressed in my post: meta keywords, why I don’t use them. Read that if you haven’t yet.

Focus on your focus keyword

Think of the focus keyword as the topic of your page or post. A good post doesn’t have multiple topics, it explores one topic. If you enter a focus keyword, the Page Analysis functionality will use that as input for its analysis of your post. It can only do this for one focus keyword at a time.

While that’s a technical reason, working around that wouldn’t be an issue. What is an issue, and also the main reason the functionality works as it does, is that we’ve found it’s already hard for most people to focus a page on one keyword. Optimizing a post for multiple keywords without spamming is actually very hard. So, try and optimize your pages for one keyword and do that well.

Determining a good focus keyword

The focus keyword input field has a bit of functionality to help you figure out what would be a good choice for that keyword. If you start typing, it opens a drop down with suggestions, these are loaded from Google Suggest and mimic what you’d see if you’d enter the search terms in a Google search field, compare this:

With this:

If people are searching, they’ll almost always get a drop down like that now, so the contents of it should be something you take into account when determining your focus keyword.

When you’re thinking about keywords, it’s probably also a good idea to read this post about cornerstone content and my post about the basis of keyword research.

The focus keyword in WordPress SEO is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Some stats on our website reviews

I started doing these website reviews in 2010, finishing 42 of them in that year. In 2011, we finished 99 website reviews, in 2012 it grew to 329. You can see this line is going up, and quite fast. These site reviews weren’t all for the same type of site, 370 of the 500 were WordPress sites, 60 were Magento, and 50 were other eCommerce sites, some of which were WordPress as well. The remainder were other types of sites, including Drupal and Joomla installs.

These numbers, to me, are mind blowing. I’d never have thought I’d sell so many of these reviews and that I’d need a team around me, as I do today, to do them. The “funny” thing: I’m absolutely certain that the quality of our site reviews has gone up just as much over time. We’ve become better and faster at analyzing problems and proposing simple and to the point solutions. Also, every site gets seen by at least two people now, almost always three, which makes sure that we don’t miss important things.

SEO: Penguin & Panda

Google is good for our business in many ways. We often get called upon to help people understand why they’d suffer from Penguin or Panda type drops of traffic. I can honestly say that sites almost invariably deserved the “slap” they got from either of these updates, and I say that knowing that we’ve seen more than 200 now. Sometimes it’s tough, as the sites that “win” because of a site losing might be even worse, but I’ll stand by what I said: the sites I have reviewed that got hit, deserved it.

There were two exceptions I can remember were instead of reviewing the site, I forwarded people on to Google and asked Google to fix the false positive. Of course there have been some minor errors, but overall, forcing these people to improve their sites is “a good thing”.

Some of the other things most sites get wrong

I thought it’d be fun to dive in a bit and see what kind of issues we talk about the most, as every word in a review is decided upon by the reviewer, this isn’t as easy as it may seem as it meant I had to do some textual analysis here and there. But, I’ve compiled a small list of topics that we often address in these reviews. These were not, in most cases the most important things to fix in those sites, it’s just that a lot of people seem to be doing them wrong.

1. 404 pages
   It baffles me in how many reviews this came up, so few people spend time making a proper 404 page… I’ve written about this quite extensively, this post about 404s for WordPress is probably the best / most interesting, even when you’re not on WordPress.
2. Subscription options
   This is probably due to us reviewing a lot of WordPress sites / blogs, but we very often find that people are missing out on lots of subscribers by not having good subscribe widgets or even altogether lacking an email newsletter.
3. Responsive websites
   If you’re serious about being on the web, whether to make money or to inform, you need to think about the different devices people will use to access your site, your content, your products. Rarely over the last few years did we find a site that had done this really well. Which is funny, especially for WordPress sites, because with good themes like a lot of the Genesis based themes around, having a responsive site doesn’t need to be expensive.
4. Internal Search
   Internal search often left a lot to be desired on the websites we reviewed. In a way, this isn’t that surprising: WordPress internal search just plain sucks (this old article from me on making it suck less is still relevant) and most other CMSes, including Magento, don’t exactly shine in that area. On the other hand: setting up a Google Custom Search Engine is not that hard…
5. Keyword usage and internal linking
   The last thing that I find we often make remarks about is the usage of keywords. Now these remarks go in all directions, but one thing is clear: simple principles like the Cornerstone Content principle are often misunderstood. Quite a number of the sites we made remarks about in this area had the keyword they wanted to rank for in the title of over a dozen pages. Think to yourself: how would Google decide which of these pages to show as the top result? Are you making that clear?
6. Call to Action
   Very often we find sites that do, in fact, rank rather well for certain terms, but make hardly any money from that fact. This is often true because they lack a clear call to action. Michiel’s article about the call to action on your homepage is a good example of the kind of advice we tend to give.

As you can see, the range of topics we discuss is quite broad, covering UX, design, SEO, conversion rate optimization and more. Over time, we’ve been spending more time on these reviews – even though our analysis of individual issues became faster – just because the breadth and depth of our reviews increased. Which is why I’m announcing the following:

Website Review price going up Feb 1st

We’ve decided to raise the price of our website review service to €749, up €154 from our current €595 price point, effective February 1st. The reason for this is simple: we’re spending more and more time on these reviews and the follow-up questions, and feel the price isn’t justifying that anymore. Because we know that a lot of people plan on these, we wanted to give you a bit of notice.

I realize this might mean that we sell quite a few reviews in the coming week and a half. As these reviews are a very manual process, this means we’ll need a bit more time than usual to get through them. Currently we take 3 to 4 weeks, this might become a bit longer even if we sell a lot, as I’m sure you’ll understand.

500 Website Reviews, what we’ve learned! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So we now offer 3 licenses to the plugin, much in the same way as Gravity Forms and Easy Digital Downloads extensions work:

• personal, for a single site at $69;
• professional, for up to 5 sites at $129;
• agency, for unlimited sites at $249.

Everyone who has bought the plugin at the old price of $89 is in luck: your license is and will remain unlimited. We will use the same pricing model for our upcoming Local SEO module.

By the way, if you’ve emailed our support email address, you might have “met” the new addition to our team: my little brother Thijs. He handles most basic support questions, while bugs and other stuff get assigned to me. All of our support is handled through email for now, for which we use, and absolutely love, HelpScout, if you handle a lot of email you should really check them out. We’re currently working on opening a support forum as well, if you’ve bought the plugin you’ll get more details on that as we roll it out.

We’re planning more improvements to our infrastructure as well as ramping up big time for the launch of a few more plugins, so make sure you subscribe to the newsletter and stay up to date!

Change of pricing / licensing for Video SEO plugin is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

What are these ?replytocom links?

Most blogs these days have threaded commenting enabled, which means that you can reply to every comment by clicking on that comments reply link. This is very neat to keep the conversations together and a feature I deeply love. This feature normally works with javascript, but because of accessibility, there is also a fallback option. If you don’t have javascript enabled, or, if you’re a bot, you’re not capable of handling it, you’ll see links that look as follows:

http://www.example.com/example-post/?replytocom=1

This would force reload the page and give you the option to reply to the comment with ID 1. I absolutely hate that fallback link. On a site like this one, with often over a hundred comments on a post, it means there are 100 links pointing to that same article, causing a lot of crawling that’s totally unneeded. For this reason I added the option in my SEO plugin to remove it, which you’ll find under SEO → Permalinks:

So what does this noindex,nofollow do?

Unfortunately, the robots meta tag WordPress adds essentially makes every URL with
?replytocom in it a dead end street. Because of the nofollow bit of the robots meta tag it adds, if say, Mashable would link to a URL with replytocom in it, my site wouldn’t actually benefit from that link. Doing nothing is much better: the rel="canonical" link element on the page, that points to the clean version, would tell search engines to use that clean version.

This is the reason why, when I found out, I immediately released version 1.3.3 of my WordPress SEO plugin that removes that noindex,nofollow line. I’ve also opened a trac ticket, we’ll see what happens with that. For now, my advice is: upgrade to 1.3.3 and check that remove replytocom variables box, unless you really need the non-javascript version to work.

WordPress threaded comments and SEO is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

His main argument, after you remove the link-bait title and the weird introduction, is that what we SEO’s call SEO these days, shouldn’t be called SEO as it should be called (decent) web development. I agree in large part with that statement. But here’s the kicker: if a web developer or web development agency fails (and they do, very often, very miserably), the client often doesn’t notice. The web developer often delivers a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles that the management asked about. The fact that technically, information structurally and architecturally, the entire site is a mess, will not be noticed by 99% of clients. At least…

Not until they notice their analytics, or rather, the fact that their phone stops ringing. And they notice one specific thing: a big hole in their traffic, where organic traffic from search engines used to be. That’s when they call an SEO, because those are the people that know about search engines, right? That, Paul, is why we’re still called SEO’s. It’s a demand driven thing: the client wants more search traffic, so he / she searches for someone that delivers that to them. They don’t know that their web developer did a lousy job, it’s our job to tell that to them.

In our website reviews we encounter, on a daily basis, websites that have been redesigned where the web developer / designer deemed it “not necessary” to do 301 redirects from the old URL structure to the new one. Where development environments are left open for Google to index and a few wrong links in the content mistakenly go to that development environment, causing havoc for the website in question. Websites where a fancy new faceted based search system causes 4.5 billion URLs (actual example), to be created and Google slowly indexes all of them, leaving the websites ranking in dust. I can go on for hours.

My buddy Richard commented:

But what if they call it “inbound marketing”?

To which Paul said:

I much prefer that. It does not apply that sites should be optimised for search engines over users.

Sigh. First of all, if SEO means anything, it’s that we optimize the search engine, not the site. The term is a weird acronym, but people know it now, so we stick with it. You see, even when BMW wants to sell “mobility”, in the end they sell cars. We all want to sell website optimization, but in the end, people come to us for SEO. That we’ll give them website optimization as a result doesn’t matter.

Also in the comments, Bill Slawski said:

A person who uses things like keyword density and gateway pages is not an SEO, and never has been.

But, if you need help with hreflang, canonical link elements, parameter handling, rel prev and next values for pagination, XML sitemaps for pages and images and videos and news, Google Plus authorship markup, Facebook’s Open Graph meta data, schema.org implementation, and many other issues that great content alone will not solve, an SEO can help you with those.

To his credit, Paul responded to that thanking Bill and stating that these:

… are not things I would expect any half decent web designers to do as part of their job.

Well to be honest Paul, I do expect a decent web designer to know that stuff and if he doesn’t, I expect him, and thus you, to stop commenting about SEO until you do know about that stuff. You obviously don’t, because If I take your article from 2010, linked above, as an example:

1. you haven’t implemented rel=”author”;
2. I can’t find an XML sitemap;
3. most of the pages on his site except for singular posts and pages lack a decent rel=”canonical” link element;
4. there is no rel=”prev” / rel=”next” implementation on his archives;
5. in fact, there is no decent pagination on those archives at all, and lastly;
6. there is no schema.org markup.

I could go on. So, Paul, you say in your article that SEO should be decent web development, but you obviously haven’t kept up to date with what decent web development is then. I have an easy fix for you though. If you install my (100% free as in beer) WordPress SEO plugin and take 2 minutes to configure it, 1 through 4 will be taken care of for you by that plugin, automatically. But if you do that I will take that as an acceptance that there is a very convenient truth about SEO. I trust I’ll get to convince you that SEO is worth while, but I think the world deserves more than just a comment on your post as a counter argument to your headline, which I know you now regret.

Let this be the first step in me, and others, convincing you of the value in SEO. I very much hope to see an article from your hand in 6 to 12 months time stating you were wrong.

Want SEOs to lose their job? Start doing yours! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

What this means? It means I’ve asked Sucuri to do a full security review of my WordPress SEO plugin. They found a couple of small issues, which I’ve all addressed in the 1.3 release I put out earlier today.

So while 1.3 might not be a major release in terms of functionality, it is the result of quite a bit of work. If you check this commit, you’ll see a ton of little changes have gone into the plugin. Most of them are really minor, but all combined, they make for a better and, more importantly, safer plugin.

I plan to do more updates to my biggest plugins to fix things like this. It’s great to be able to do that because of a, now thriving, paid plugin business. So thank you, to those of you who bought a premium plugin, you are helping us give you a better product!

WordPress SEO, more secure than ever before. is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Disable OpenGraph in Jetpack

The best solution, honestly, is to install another plugin by Mark Jaquith, called Manual Control for Jetpack. This disables Jetpack automatic activation of new modules. Now you at least have to manually do something for stuff to break on your site when the Jetpack team decides to push new stuff.

This particular OpenGraph feature is in the Publicize module, so you’d think you could disable that, but that doesn’t seem to work. Instead, adding this line in your functions.php should fix this particular problem:

add_filter( 'jetpack_enable_opengraph', '__return_false', 99 );

I understand that disabling OpenGraph in WordPress SEO could work too. I would recommend against that though, especially if you use our Video SEO plugin as that relies on our ability to control OpenGraph tags.

Calling for Automattic to be more responsible

I also want to call on Automattic‘s Jetpack team. You guys should know better than to do stuff like this. You’ve literally cost me about half a days worth of support work now with this single release. It’d be cool if you, just like the rest of Automattic, would work with the community instead of against it.

I know you’re capable of it, because this line in the plugin:

if ( in_array( 'facebook/facebook.php', $active_plugins ) )
add_filter( 'jetpack_enable_opengraph', '__return_false', 99 );

This shows me that you did think about what would happen if Facebook’s plugin was active. That’s logical because people at Automattic worked on that plugin too. Now next time, please look at some of the repositories most popular plugins too and adjust accordingly. At the very least start a conversation with plugin authors about what’s coming up when you create stuff that clashes.

Update: might be good to note, when Facebook’s plugin is active and OpenGraph is enabled in my SEO plugin, my plugin filters the output of the Facebook plugin to prevent two sets of OpenGraph tags. Niall Kennedy of Facebook has actually also submitted a patch to my SEO plugin to improve how it does OpenGraph. That’s how this community should work.

Jetpack and WordPress SEO is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

You might think: couldn’t I just always load that image over SSL? Yes you could, but that’d be slower, which is why I chose not to do it.

Getting an SSL certificate on your server

This is by far the geekiest bit of this entire process, and not something I want to explain completely. In fact, I didn’t even do this myself. Just like all other VPS.net customers, you can get a free Comodo SSL certificate, all you have to do is file a support request for your VPS. It’s one of the reasons why I think VPS.net delivers the best WordPress hosting out there. BTW, they’re running a special at VPS.net, giving away Amazon gift cards for new VPSes, so if you’ve been thinking about switching, now’s a better time than any to switch to VPS.net.

I had already set up the free certificate a while back, as I wanted to run my WordPress admin over https, but I decided to go for a Extended Validation certificate today. This is a certificate that doesn’t just show an SSL icon in the browsers location bar but actually gives a green background for it and adds the company’s name, like so:

Of course this isn’t needed for every site, but I think it’s worth testing if you sell products. It provides just that bit of extra trust that can be so needed for online transactions.

Next: forcing SSL on that one page

There are plugins that can do this for you, most notably WordPress HTTPS, but as I wanted a bit more control and understanding of what was happening, I decided to code it manually. The code consists of two bits, this bit forces the checkout page to be on https all the time and at the same time redirects all pages that do not need to be SSL to an http URL:

function yst_ssl_template_redirect() {
	if ( is_page( 123 ) && ! is_ssl() ) {
		if ( 0 === strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'http') ) {
			wp_redirect(preg_replace('|^http://|', 'https://', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']), 301 );
			exit();
		} else {
			wp_redirect('https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 301 );
			exit();
		}
	} else if ( !is_page( 123 ) && is_ssl() && !is_admin() ) {
		if ( 0 === strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'http') ) {
			wp_redirect(preg_replace('|^https://|', 'http://', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']), 301 );
			exit();
		} else {
			wp_redirect('http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 301 );
			exit();
		}
	}
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'yst_ssl_template_redirect', 1 );

If you’re sure the URL will always be “clean”, as in, without parameters, this can be even simpler, but in this case I needed it to work with the URL parameters that Easy Digital Downloads uses. The number 123 is the ID of the checkout page, you should of course replace with your own page ID if you use this code.

Now we also want get_permalink to return the right URL, so let’s filter its output:

function yst_checkout_page_ssl( $permalink, $post, $leavename ) {
	if ( 123 == $post->ID )
		return preg_replace( '|^http://|', 'https://', $permalink );
	return $permalink;
}
add_filter( 'pre_post_link', 'yst_checkout_page_ssl', 10, 3 );

This way if something links to the checkout page, the redirect isn’t even needed as the link is already an https link.

MaxCDN, W3 Total Cache & SSL: a golden trio

My favourite WordPress CDN provider MaxCDN, works great with W3 Total Cache. It does so even with SSL, if you know how to set it up. It’s very bloody simple too once you know it: for each CNAME, you enter not just the CNAME, but you follow it by a comma, and then enter the SSL version. For me, this looks like this (click for larger version):

This settings makes W3 Total Cache use the first hostname for http requests, and the second one for https. With a rather image heavy site like this one that’s a golden thing.

Broken SSL: fixing links in theme files

If you load a page over SSL, all the other files that are loaded on that page should also be loaded over SSL for it to not be “broken”. This means that every single image, javascript file, stylesheet etc. needs to be loaded over SSL. WordPress will fix a lot of this for you, but you’ll probably encounter some issues, as did I, causing a broken SSL icon in the location bar, as shown above here.

In my case, within my theme’s stylesheet, I was loading a google web font file. That shouldn’t be an issue, of course, but I was loading that font file over http, instead of using what’s called a protocol relative link. Every time you’re embedding images, javascript or CSS files, you should be using a protocol relative link. Instead of linking to:

http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,600

I’m now linking to:

//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,600

As you can see, I left out the http:, this will make the browser use the current protocol to fetch that file. This means that when a user is on plain http, it’ll use that, which is faster, but if the user is on https, it’ll use the safe https link.

Bonus: WordPress SSL setup for the admin panel

Now that you’ve set all this up, you might as well use that SSL certificate for your admin too. That part is actually pretty easy. Just drop this in the wp-config.php:

define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

That’ll force the entire admin over SSL, which is what you want in most cases. If that is too slow for you though, you could also decide to just force the login page over SSL:

define('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', true);

This will force the login and registration pages to be SSL. I think you should go for the first option though, and run your entire admin over SSL.

Conclusion: WordPress SSL setup is easy, do it!

With all these tips, there’s really no reason anymore why you couldn’t run any page where a user submits private data on SSL. So, just do it!

WordPress SSL setup tips & tricks is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Wistia support: embedding and SEO

The support for Wistia that is added in this release was on the list from day one of this plugins release. It was one of the most highly requested video platforms to be supported, but there was an issue: there’s no official Wistia plugin other than a small thing that preserves the embed code from being mangled, even though Wistia itself does support oEmbed.

So I decided to go the extra mile and add oEmbed support for Wistia through the plugin, which, in itself is fairly easy. But then I found out that oEmbed in WordPress really has no way to filter the URL you’re sending to the video provider, and I needed to add variables to get the SEO version of the embed code. A lot of thinking later, I decided, heck, let’s try it with the normal embed code. And it worked, miraculously, Google found it and properly showed it as a video.

WordPress 3.5 adds a filter for the oEmbed URL, which means that when you use a URL in the editor, I can add parameters to that to further optimize, so we’ll do that further down the line. For now, this update makes it easy to embed Wistia videos, just drop the URL to the video on one line and it should embed the video properly, recognize it in Video SEO and do all the optimization for you. Gotta love simplicity.

Vippy support

Another video platform that had been requested literally on day one of the plugin being released was Vippy, requested by my SEOktoberfest buddy Geir. His colleague from Metronet, well known WordPress developer Ronald Huereca, patched the plugin to automatically support Vippy when the Vippy WordPress plugin is being used.

Supported plugins & themes

This release adds support for two video embedding plugins, FlowPlayer and WP Video Lightbox. Which means we now support 12 video plugins. We now also support the embed codes for YouTube and Vimeo videos from the popular Weaver theme, even though I think it’s unwise to use those, because when you switch themes, your videos will no longer play.

What else do you want?

If you’re a user of the plugin: what else would you like to see? If you’re not a user yet but you do do video, what’s holding you back? Please let me know in the comments! Also, if you don’t have the plugin yet, buy it here.

Video SEO for Wistia & Vippy is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Why sell premium WordPress plugins?

Of course we got some backlash for making a plugin available to the world and daring to charge for it. Unfortunately there are still people in the WordPress community who think everything should be free. What they don’t understand is that not everything can be free.

I’m the author of several highly popular WordPress plugins. My Google Analytics plugin is nearing 4 million downloads and my WordPress SEO plugin has over 2.5 million downloads. They’re both free. I’m not saying making those free plugins hasn’t made me any money, of course it has. There are some (though few) donations, there are people ordering website reviews, hiring me as a consultant etc. But we’d make more money if we didn’t release those plugins. That’s the cold and harsh reality. I’m not willing to stop releasing those plugins though. I’ve always said they’ll be free and I want to keep those that I’ve released for free, free.

Other plugins though, like the Video SEO plugin, require a bit more support and continuous updating to work with video networks, new embed codes, changes from Google, etc. When I was looking at what needed to be done for that, I knew that releasing it for free was not going to be a viable option. Which is why we made it premium. Some people think its price tag $89 is too much. Well, in that case, you’re not seeing the value yet and I probably need to explain better. Anyone who knows what this kind of search traffic is worth to their site knows that $89 is dirt cheap.

Making money directly == more time to invest in development

Getting paid to develop a plugin means you can invest more time. I don’t have to make my money doing consulting on the side now, working on those plugins is paying for itself. This means development on these plugins accelerates quite a bit. I’ve been able to add support for a nice list of video embedding plugins to the Video SEO plugin because of that and the next version, due tomorrow, will add two new video hosting providers, Wistia and Vippy.

I can honestly say that this has done very well for us. The plugin has made us a nice amount so far and users seem to be very happy. Reviews like this one from Bas and this tweet from Bryan make me very happy and proud:

1 week after implementing the Yoast Video SEO for WordPress + SEO plugin & ranking high with video thumbnails for important phrases! Use it!

— Bryan Eisenberg (@TheGrok) November 5, 2012

You now know the why, on to the how:

How we sell premium WordPress plugins

When I decided I wanted to go premium, I needed an infrastructure to sell those plugins. I looked at ThemeForest / CodeCanyon and several other marketplaces. All of them wanted an extraordinary percentage of sales, considering how much extra sales I estimated they would add. Of course I do have a head start, being in this industry for a while and having been blogging on this blog for at least 7 consecutive years.

So, I decided to go self hosted. I tried several ecommerce plugins and while each had their benefits, they all failed to do well what I needed them to do best: deliver digital goods. All of them failed, until I found Easy Digital Downloads.

This plugin was built with the exact purpose of what I needed to do in mind, and built by a coder who actually knows how to write decent code, Pippin Williamson. He has a good model around it too, the core plugin is free and can be found on WordPress.org, while he has a growing set of extensions of which some are premium.

The first ones you’ll want to grab are for payment gateways. I’m not in the US, so I can’t use Stripe, unfortunately, which left me with PayPal (which is built-in and free) and Moneybookers. It’s not ideal, so I’m trying to figure out a better solution, if you have ideas, do let me know in the comments.

I use another one of these premium extensions, the software licensing one, to generate my license keys and several others to perform various other tasks and tricks, like a MailChimp extension to sign people up to my mailing list when they buy, an AWS S3 extension to host my files on Amazon, etc. etc.

In fact, I even wrote my own, an extension to track sales in Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, which is now for sale for $15 on the EDD site. It has allowed me to optimize my sales process already, and if you start selling, I hope it’ll help you too. The fact that it was relatively easy to write this extension is a testament to how well written Easy Digital Downloads is.

Conclusion: use Easy Digital Downloads & sell!

If you’ve ever considered selling plugins or ebooks or other digital goods, this is the plugin you need and it’s written by the kind of guy you want to rely on. Pippin has been tremendously good in support and has given some very smart advice.

Also, I can definitely recommend selling plugins. It’s funny and a bit sad at the same time, but I realized the other day that while I get abusive, support demanding emails for my free plugins on a daily basis, each and every paid user that needed support has been great to work with. It’s as though when people pay for stuff, they respect that you have a job to do, whereas some free plugin users seem to not think about you at all. Loads of people have been telling me I should charge for my WordPress SEO plugin. I won’t, but it’s good to know that there are a lot of people willing to pay for my work.

We’re very close to releasing our second premium plugin, one that is geared towards Local SEO, make sure you sign up for the newsletter on the right or below this post to get news about that and the other cool stuff we have planned.

I would love to hear what you think of all this, let me know in the comments!

Why & how we sell premium WordPress plugins is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!