All In One SEO Getting A Bad Rap?

[Jeffro]

Looks like Quick Online Tips is laying the blame on their recent Google Page Rank drop on the All In One SEO Plugin.

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archi...ogle-pagerank/

Considering the plugin author is a member of this community, it will be interesting to hear what Michael has to say :)

[Shepherd Jim]

I'll be interested to see this unfold. SEO confuses the socks off my feet and makes my hair hurt, what little's left. But one aspect of what seems to be going on here involves "canonical" URLs (see thread I started I want my "www" back! Halp! about me wanting my URL to include my trusty old "www") so this is real timely for me.

[Leland]

What was their original PR? I didn't see that mentioned in the entire article, just that it is now a PR4. Honestly, it was probably just a coincidence.

I'm not even going to get into the whole "PR is useless" argument, but if their rankings in the SERPS are the same, who cares?

[andrea_r]

I think it was more an issues of someone mindlessly upgrading plugins and not double-checking settings.

[dancole]

It's their fault for using it. I'm not sure how many people have read the license agreement, but it clearly state that there is no warranty... meaning use it at your own risk. If they wanted something that work the way they though it would, they should have contracted a professional company.

I don't think I would have targeted an open source project that publicly, unless they were not listening to my input. Although the post wasn't that negative. I guess I don't understand why they thought they could leverage their whole SEO with the product of some 3rd party, without any over sight of what was going on. I personally check every last detail after each update to see if I was getting what I'd expect to get.

[hallsofmontezuma]

1 They never contacted me with their perceived issue. I only know about it because of the endless retweets.
2 Out of the tens of thousands of users who have upgraded, exactly one (quickonlinetips.com) has reported having a pagerank drop.
3 The fact that their pagerank dropped isn't even close to evidence that All in One SEO Pack is the cause.
4 Even if All in One SEO Pack's new feature is the cause, they should have checked the options page when upgrading. This feature, like many others, is turned on by default. The documentation has always informed users that the recommended configuration is set by default in the plugin. So if that's my fault, I see two courses of action for this:
a) I can stop releasing updates for the plugin (I doubt most people want that)
b) I can have new functionality disabled by default (Since the person complains that I enabled the feature by default upon upgrade, this would resolve the issue for them. However, their whole basis for their complaint is that they didn't check for the new options. So if I go this route, there's no point in me ever releasing updates to begin with.)
5 The new version of the plugin has been out a week. So they've had this version for no longer than that. You can do your own research as to whether or not a site's public PR can drop from whatever they claim to have been to a PR 4 in that amount of time.

[andrea_r]

I'm thinking this was a linkbait post from them. Wanna guess how much extra traffic they got? The title was an inaccurate reflection of what actually happened.

But, you know, "we were dumb" isn't a killer headline.

[hallsofmontezuma]

Andrea, I felt the same way as well when I saw their post. They even admit (several pages down at the very bottom) that it's their fault for not checking, and that All in One SEO Pack is only one of many possible causes.

The truth is, there is no real evidence All in One SEO Pack caused their troubles. Generally, when someone feels one of my plugins has a bug, they don't make a post about it with a misleading title that is sure to attract a lot of attention, rather they send me an email (or at least post on the support forum). This person chose the former.

Had they contacted me, I certainly would have worked with them to determine whether there is a bug in the plugin.

[tekzt]

I think it´s because their wp "root" is '/archives'. Search Engines could think it´s really just the archives. their fault, if they link all the canonicals to a url that seems of lesser value to google.

[hallsofmontezuma]

Unless I'm missing something, the plugin is doing exactly what it's supposed to. If they have /archives as their blog home page, then /archives is the canonical url for their homepage. If they want to have the domain root as their blog homepage, they should change it in their settings.