Bad WordPress SEO Advice

Hey David,

Thanks for all the buzz about this, but please take a look at our plugin, before writing anything so hurtful. I know you think we’re competitors, even thought that’s not really a thing.

Anyway, if you say that Matt Cutts and the guys from MOZ don’t know their stuff, well I don’t know who does then.

We simply say in our plugin that if the article has keywords that are EMD, it doesn’t stand a good chance of being indexed. Which you can see throughly described in an article from MOZ. not sure I’m allowed to post links here and such, so I won’t.

Google it: Are Exact-Match Domains (EMDs) in Decline?

And about the wiki stuff you said earlier, seriously m8, you’re encouraged by Matt Cutts and others to link to high-authority domain. You know what wikipedia is, right?

Best regards,
Florin

PS: we’re not competitors of any kind actually, since Squirrly focuses on content, not on SEO settings, so I don’t know why you have to be such a hater and say stuff like that.

Of course I looked at your plugin before reviewing it! Since a couple of weeks have passed since I reviewed the plugin it’s quite easy to find in Google now for relevant searches (guess you’ve read it).

I’ve deliberately NOT posted the link to my review because it would look like self promotion (leave that to Google). When I looked at what the plugin did was hoping it was a good plugin, would be great to find a plugin that advises on content SEO with an affiliate program so I could review AND promote it (one of the reasons why I looked: if it were a great plugin I’d be an affiliate).

Anyway, regarding the article https://moz.com/blog/are-exact-match-domains-in-decline which you are relying on for your incorrect statement Google will ban a site for having your keywords in the domain and title tag. Can I point you at this little section:

Correlation vs. Causation

Let’s get this out of the way – just because EMDs hold less spots in the top 10, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Google has turned down the “volume” on EMDs as a ranking factor. It simply means that less EMDs are ranking overall, and that could have many explanations. What we’ll be looking at here is patterns over time, to try to tell more of the story.

and

Likewise, Penguin correlation is not Penguin causation. I don’t think that Penguin directly targeted EMDs. I suspect that, by targeting some forms of spammy anchor text, Penguin disproportionately hit EMDs. Many people who use EMDs solely for ranking purposes are also aggressive with exact-match anchor text. The EMD drop was probably collateral damage.

That is pretty much how I’d have described any drop in EMD’s ranking as high as they used to. Basically Google has got much better at determining aggressive SEO tactics, a shady SEO technique that worked a few years ago will not work as well today. There’s a lot of black hat SEOs who use EMDs, but that is not the same as EMDs are banned by Google as matter of course which is what your plugin advise is.

Even if Google were taking EMDs into account less so today that is FAR from a Google ban, ranking factors value change all the time.

There’s strong evidence Google doesn’t count backlinks as highly as they used to, but you wouldn’t argue gaining backlinks per se will get your site banned!

You have based an aspect of a plugin on very bad SEO advice that from the looks of things you’ve misunderstood the article you are relying on.

It’s interesting how I own two EMDs for the theme I develop and they are number 1, 2 and 3 in Google for the exact match search (3 million+ competing pages, 37K “exact match”). Number 4 is a www.ads-software.com page (for a plugin I created), number 5 an exact match blogpsot blog review page, If your advice was correct why are those domains not banned from Google as you say they will be? One of those domains is ranking number 5 for squirrly review: doesn’t look banned to me.

Good advice would be if you tend to follow blackhat SEO techniques, and plan to scrape content from sites like Wikipedia, Twitter, Google image search using a plugin like Squirrly don’t be shocked when your site is downgraded in Google from low quality content.

I fully standby what I said and the review.

David Law

what plugin do you then recommend David Law?

Depends on what you are trying to achieve?

Most of the SEO plugins don’t add a great deal of advanced SEO to a WordPress blog, it’s mostly very basic SEO that doesn’t add a great deal of SEO.

Yoast for example pretty much modifies the title of posts and adds some SEO fluff like content for Twitter and Facebook… Not exactly advanced SEO, the title you add to Yoast for example is only used as the title tag, to use the Yoast title tag for more advanced SEO you’d need a theme that uses the Yoast data for more than just the title and there aren’t many of them around: I only know of one, I developed the theme (deliberately not self promoting my stuff here since it would suggest I created the review to self promote).

Same argument for All In One SEO and pretty much all plugins that modify the title tag, it’s nice to have an option to have a different title tag for a post, but the same can be achieved by setting a WordPress posts title to the same as what the Yoast/All In One title is set.

There are no plugins that modify theme SEO mistakes, most themes use headers in an inappropriate way for example, no plugin modifies the header (h1, h2, h3…) output, so plugins alone do not result in a fully SEO’d WordPress blog.

You’d gain more SEO from a plugin like https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/seo-image/ (Vladimir Prelovac makes some useful plugins). If in the past you’ve done a poor job of adding alt text to your images the above plugin could be a stop gap while you fix it. SEO wise it’s better to manually modify your posts images alt text since ideally you’d want to mix up the alt text a bit, but if you have a 10,000 post site with rubbish alt text using the plugin above is better than doing nothing: I’ve used it on autoblogs where it’s not really an option to manually edit every image (not exactly autoblogging if you edit all your posts :-)).

Plugins that add the sort of features that Squirrly offer again aren’t useful. Since they don’t take into account what your theme and other plugins output the data is practically useless. What SEO value is there in knowing the keyword density of a posts content (just the text) when the actual posts (what visitors and Google sees) also includes the header, sidebars and a footer that changes the keyword density? I have sites targeting the SEO niche, most of the posts will include the word SEO in the posts title and content, the sidebar content (popular posts, recent posts widgets) are going to be high density for the word SEO, this is not taken into account by plugins when measuring keyword density.

I add no SEO value to actual keyword density (it’s practically irrelevant), but if I were measuring it I’d measure what Google sees, which means loading the post as Google sees it, not as we (and plugins like Squirrly) see it within the WordPress edit post page.

David Law

Thank you for your valued input Dave.

Hi Dave,

Came across this post and read your review and other tidbits… your a passionate person and your always ready for a battle ??

Anyway somethings i agree and some i dont, i believe you may be thinking in a certain way and maybe because your not getting what your believe is right then the product/plugin in rubbish.

It really does depend on the plugin and what it is set out to achieve, i dont user squirrly for the record but just seeing its feature videos it seems to be more of a content marketing tool rather than a hardcore seo tool.

I have also used many seo tools over the years, some are rubbish some are decent, but they all have features that i believe any seo needs, not because were lazy, far from that son, its because you want to be more efficient. Some of the tools are not even meant for the hardcore seo and more so for the basic beginner which i believe squirrly is targeted to. Some people dont know the ranking factors and need help in this respect which i believe many plugins achieve.

For example i saw you smashed the yoast plugin, i use the yoast plugin, why ? not because im lazy but because i can add meta’s and features to the website much much quicker than doing it manually, for example, the xml sitemap feature, the authorship feature (although defunct now, it was useful), publisher meta (still relevant), twitter, facebook meta’s, a visual guide to the rich snippet for the title and description meta and to know when it cuts off. Do you honestly think im going to sit there and count the amount of letters before i know its going to get cut off ??? no way, id rather visually see it within seconds rather than minutes.

The yoast plugin also modifies the header file if necessary if it finds seo problems with the title tag, ive come across some themes that have issues with coding and the yoast plugin has detected and fixed them. So the comment you gave on that no plugin actually fixes anything seo related is incorrect.

On page seo ranking factors are important and yoast does give some insight into this, but its not complete, i have found EasyWPSEO pretty good for onsite factors more than any other plugin ive used to date.

Your comment on keyword density is incorrect as well, there are some plugins that do infact count keyword density by reading the entire DOCUMENT not just the post or page content. EasyWPSEO is one such plugin that actually reads the entire document and gives a good indication of density levels, and density is important its part of over optimization, if your keyword density for a keyword is 20% and looks spammy then yes you may be penalized.

Your right in saying however there is no plugin that modifies h1, h2, h3, but logically that is not possible as that is up to the content creator to create those headings appropriately.

The big question is which i see your seeing red about is the EMD match to the titles tags that squirrly offers advice on.

Im in the middle here, i do not think that its completely going to devalue or not rank you just for that purpose, i also have many EMD domains ranking number 1. BUT and its a big BUT, as you would know with the rollout of future algo updates to penguin or panda this MAY be more of a problem down the road. As you would know heaps and heaps of site got smashed in the recent penguin update, one factor is the over optimized anchor texts, its all about ratio now and how natural it looks. I have had to re-evaluate the sitewide links we created to all our clients websites we built over the years and update the copyright information with our exact match keyword to our website due to the ratio being completely out of whack… something so small back then is a big deal now.

The biggest thing to take away from all this is does the content, backlinking, anchortexts, whatever strategy you want to use… IS IT NATURAL looking if something looks over optimized or looks like your trying to outsmart google then yes you could be setting up for failure so in concluding what squirrly is saying re the title being exact match to the domain is a valid point, but not the only factor by far.

Ill be taking a look at squirry at some stage and install it and see what benefits its gives at some stage but im too busy at the moment ??