Bye Bye All in One SEO

I have officially dumped the All in One SEO plugin for behavior unbecoming an SEO plugin. From start to finish, it took all of one afternoon, with its hidden fields or no. All it basically took was one big PHP else if statement inside my Wordpress Theme.

Better than the All in One SEO Pack

Not only did I duplicate everything that the All in One SEO plugin does. My quick fix is actually better than the original. Rather than have these HTML statements spread all over the place in the source code, those SEO directives are now located exactly where they should be: On the very top of the source code for each web page.

All in One SEO did me dirty!

Not only did upgrading to version 1.6.1 mess up my standing in Google, but the database change it made appeared to have converted all the title, description, and keyword customs fields into what WordPress calls hidden fields. The net result is that my quick fix works with the All in One SEO invisible fields, but updating them will be impossible. While I have provided a method of updating old posts, the fact that all these fields are currently invisible leaves me a bit uncomfortable. So, I might yet backup to the point just before his database conversion.

Any approach that you take on these hidden fields which were made possible by Wordpress itself just means more work for you. In general, old posts in a blog are ancient history. So, as long as these hidden fields do not suddenly disappear on your blog, then my current approach actually should not be much of a problem. Nor, will there be any duplication. I have duplicate description fields on just one post, the post that I tested it on.

All in One SEO was easy to replace!

My specialty is solving problems.

The hardest part was the quickest to code. And, what should have been totally insignificant, took me for ever to code in PHP, Wordpress style. It appears that I managed to stumble across a bug in one of WordPress’ functions. It would have to be a bug, since I had to jump through hoops in order to get the job done.

The actual coding used to replace the All in One SEO plugin is provided in Customizing Meta Tags in Wordpress. A few months ago, I had implemented descriptions for all my tags, which is something that the All in One SEO plugin does not do. Multiple pages were a bit of a bear to solve. But, if the objective is to get more of your pages to stick in Google, then I just might have come up with a better approach.

My quick fix replacement for the All in One SEO pack is in fact operational and works quite well. All that is left to do is to develop a few posts that will explain exactly what I did, and how anyone can quickly duplicate the same for free. That will be the only hard part.

• A New Day, A New Set of Problems
• Customizing Meta Tags in Wordpress
• Using Conditionals In Your Theme Sidebars