Not terrible, but not great

  • radgh

    (@radgh)


    9 years ago

    Out of the box, this plugin is very lacking. It does not consistently fill in defaults on various meta tags and open graph tags.

    Simple things like open graph descriptions aren’t pulled in from post content. You have to manually add them to the SEO Settings metabox. The open graph image doesn’t pull in the featured image as a fallback, which it should.

    Open graph tags are especially important for sharing on Facebook. This is very much considered SEO and should be just as important as your meta tags.

    Most of the modules it comes with are bloated and should be disabled as soon as you activate the plugin.

    It also doesn’t seem to do sitemaps at all. SEO by Yoast has fantastic sitemaps.

    And a lot of modules aren’t related to SEO at all. Like widgets, rich snippet creator, whatever “whitepapers” is.

    Turn this plugin off, and your site performs much better. This plugin really needs optimized.

    If you go through and fully customize this plugin, then it’s not so bad. I’ve actually written my own plugin to fix a few of the problems, but another issue with SEO Ultimate – it’s very plugin un-friendly. You have to go completely out of your way to filter the meta description (by using get_metadata’s filter itself, which is not performant).

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Jeffrey L. Smith

    (@seo-design-solutions)

    Hi:

    The features you are referring to are included in the premium version (fallback to global based on featured image) as well as thew ability to customize unique OG data on twitter, G+ and Facebook individually.

    On SEO Ultimate+ there are also an additional 7 rich-snippets and when you refer to the rich snippet creator (SEO Ultimate was the first plugin to offer this function years ago).

    So, for the free version we have left that module as is and rewriten the code in the premium.

    Also, regarding meta keywords (it is disabled by default) since meta keywords have not been used by Google since 2009… but, there are other search engines that still use them so, we left the module as an option.

    Regarding the last statement about filtering out meta description, you simply have to disable the module with that and any other module if you already have a plugin or theme that is using that functionality.

    All the best,

    Jeffrey

    Plugin Author Jeffrey L. Smith

    (@seo-design-solutions)

    Also Radh:

    Hope I didn’t come off the wrong way…

    If you’d like to be a contributor, we’d gladly add you to our github if you’d like to apply some of the optimizations you suggested.

    In the meantime, you can check out SEO Ultimate+ here or some of the free documentation and SEO training series on how to unleash each module.

    All the best,

    Jeffrey

    Thread Starter radgh

    (@radgh)

    Ah, I’ve learned our content manager has an exported version of his settings to roll out for SEO Ultimate. The keywords module is still turned on in there probably from a long time ago. I’ve removed that from my previous comments and added a star to the review.

    Regarding the pro version, if your pricing model was more inline with Advanced Custom Fields or WP All Import, then we would definitely upgrade.

    But updates only last a year. This doesn’t work for us. Thanks anyway.

    I don’t think I’ll be contributing since it sounds like the features I’ve requested are all locked in the pro version already.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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