All Category SEO Updater Tips

**Important Update**

I have just discovered the All Category SEO Updater is behind a problem I’ve been experiencing with tags (getting a blank page). If you use tags or search on your Worpress site I don’t recommend installing it which is a shame! More info: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/271978

There are many who will say you should noindex category pages on Wordpress but I say these pages are potentially quite valuable and feel they shouldnt just be ‘indexed’ but also optimised.

All In One SEO is a great plug in but is limited as far as optimising those category pages goes. You can change how the title displays but that’s about it.

All Category SEO Updater lets you do a bit more to category pages such as adding a H1, a description and some page text (which is the thing I most like about it). It does have a few downsides most of which I can live with but the one thing I found quite bizarre is that the plugin automatically adds a robots meta to “noindex” those category pages.

The developer has said he will consider including an option for index/noindex in the next update but until then I had to make the change myself. Here is what I did:

Opened file:

 plugins/all-category-seo-updater/php/allCategorySeoUpdater.class.php

Removed this line of code:

$meta_new_robots = "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex,follow\" />";

The plugin also adds a link rel=”canonical” which you can remove too:

if(get_option('aiosp_can')){
 $url = $this->aiosp_mrt_get_url($wp_query);
 if ($url) {
 echo "".'<link rel="canonical" href="'.$url.'" />'."\n";
 }
 }

I also wanted to change the defaulted H1 font size, weight and colour to save me having to repeat it over and over with every category page change. Here is where you change the H1 size and weight:

*/
 if($_POST['h1_font_size']==''){
 $_POST['h1_font_size'] = '12';
 }
 if($_POST['h1_font_weight']==''){
 $_POST['h1_font_weight'] = '400';
 }

(400 is normal, 700 is bold)

And finally, here is where you change the default H1 colour:

$bak_color = '0000ff';

(you don’t need the #)

I hope that helps. If anyone has any further tips for this plugin please comment.