In this highly optimized episode of WordPress Weekly, I interviewed Michael Torbert who is more commonly known as hallsofmontezuma throughout the WordPress community. He is now the developer of the most popular plugin in the plugin repository, theAll In One SEO pack. We discuss what it’s like to maintain an insanely popular plugin, how difficult it has been to work with the WordPress code, thoughts on SEO in general, and the question of the night went to David Peralty for asking if SEO could be damaged by mis configuring the plugin. You’ll have to listen to the show to get the answer. On top of that, I give my plugin pick of the week, the WordPress job of the week and much more on episode 24 of WordPress weekly.
Ad Copy:
WordPress Weekly is brought to you by the fine advertisers on WeblogToolsCollection.com. Without their continued support, this show would not be possible. I would also like to personally thank each and every one of you who download and listen to this show. Your continued support is greatly appreciated. If you are interested in advertising on WordPress Weekly, please contact Mark Ghosh via this contact form.
News:
WordPress 2.7 is nearing feature freeze. Once that happens, we should start to see announcements in the dashboard regarding beta releases. Based on everything I have read, 2.7 is on schedule to be released on November 10th. If something major is discovered during the beta trials, the date of release will obviously be changed.
Didn’t get the chance to mention this on the show but I wanted to pass along a happy birthday to HackWordPress.com as they have turned 1 year old.
Feedback:
I cover feedback related to last weeks episode. We encourage any feedback you may have with regards to the show. You can either email me via jeffro at jeffro2pt0.com or you can simply leave us a comment on the blog.
Plugin Of The Week:
Jeff – Exclude Pages – This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus). Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.) You could do this just as easily by adding exclusion arguments to the WP_LIST_PAGES function but this plugin takes those steps out of the process.
WordPress Job Of The Week:
This job was published on October 10th on the WeblogToolsCollection.com Job board. Sure Foods Living is looking for someone who can upgrade WordPress 2.1 to the current version. The individual at one point had someone to help them customize their site but that person is no longer available. Also, because of the upgrade, this person needs to change templates since the current one is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress. The potential client is asking for people who are qualified and for quotes on how much this project would cost. If you are interested in this job, please contact alison at surefoodsliving.com
Announcements:
Jane Wells who works for Automattic in the user experience/usability department will be our special one hour guest on Halloween night. That is Friday, October 31st, 2008. So if you’re interested in talking usability in WordPress, definitely mark this date on your calendar.
WPWeekly Meta:
Next Episode: Friday October 17th, 2008 8P.M. EST
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Length Of Episode: 58 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode24.mp3
Listen To Episode #24:
While not broadly advertised, I happened to catch Brian Gardner for about an hour to discuss his announcement regarding going open source. During the interview, we discuss topics such as the grey area of the GPL, his new business model, his new approach to themes, how similar his business model is to the WordPress.com model, the state of themes in WordPress and much more.
Listen To The Brian Gardner Interview:
Thanks for mentioning our birthday Jeff!
Looking forward to listening to the podcast. Keep up the good work!
You’re welcome man. See you around for year #2
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you misspelled “buy” which should be “by” the fine advertisers
You’re correct. I’ve corrected the typo. Ironic that that particular typo would appear in the Ad Copy section lol.
Not the first time I’ve seen that kind of typo, BUY and AD COPY are pretty much related LOL anyways, still waiting for the file to be downloaded to listen to it later when I go to sleep.
Ouch, not sure how to take that comment. Does the show help you to fall asleep from boredom? LOL
I find it better to listen to Podcasts when I’m doing nothing, and before sleeping is the best time. I don’t listen to it in order to fall asleep. LOL
Now, here’s what I can say.
I’M CONFUSED.
I tried to experiment with a blog with the All In One SEO plugin that I’m using on almost all my blogs and with a blog that isn’t using it.
The blog without the plugin is the root of the domain, while the sub domain is the one without the plugin.
I don’t know whether some other factors affected the results, but, the blog without the ALL IN ONE SEO Plugin tops the results, while the blog with the plugin doesn’t. Now that’s quite tricky huh.
I can’t remember if this was on the recorded portion of the show or the after show but I believe we discussed how difficult it would be to come up with comparisons between sites that use the plugin and sites that do not as there are way too many variables to consider.
This is entirely anecdotal, but I noticed a significant increase in search engine traffic following installation. Perhaps more important than that was seeing increased SE consistency.
I do remember Michael stating that just having the plugin installed and left at default settings is better than not running it at all. Perhaps you are proof of that statement.
I just downloaded and installed the All in One SEO Pack. Excited to see what effect it has on ranking and traffic.
all in seo is very good for wordpress script
i have 45 web site i using all in seo
thanks
All in one seo pack maybe the easy way for notice search engine but it not will guarantee if our blog will good on page rank.
Now that I listened to the show, I’ll give this Plugin a try. Those last two shows were a great comeback…job well done!
Thanks Nicolas. I hope you continue to listen to the show!
Thanks for the link to the Exclude Pages plugin… I can think of a few sites of mine that could benefit from that. Cheers.
Michael has finally replied to my email after some weeks waiting for an update, moderators please feel free to delete my previous comment as it’s a (partly) inaccurate description of him.
Previous comment was deleted. Glad to see he replied back to you as he didn’t come across that way when he was on the show.
I use All in One Seo pack too. But, is it wise if we enable google to crawl TAG or not?
i use platinum so pack and all in one seo on my other site … both work superb … just like the paid vbseo for vbulletin forums!!!