This morning I found a blog post at Real Estate Blog Lab with a nice cheat sheet for configuring the All in One SEO Pack plugin.
Even if you already have this plugin configured you may find sometimes you loose all the settings (as it happened to me this morning on my other blog). I think I may have lost the settings when I upgraded to the latest version of the plugin, who knows.
I’m inserting the image from the post for future reference. Although I’m sure in time it may become outdated, for now I think it’s a handy, time saving tool.
To read the entire post see My All-In-One-SEO Settings and Summary at www.realestatebloglab.com.
The only setting not shown above is the checkbox next to Canonical URL. I can’t seem to find a simple answer about what it means to have it checked/unchecked. I’ve seen several long winded posts with multiple comments about 301 redirects but no one seems to have a concrete answer as to when or why we should check this box.
Update: I just checked Jack Leblond’s All in One SEO Configuration Chart and found information on this setting:
Canonical URLs
This newly added feature is enabled by default – leave it that way. If you are not familiar with canonical URLs, and would like to be – read this Google webmaster blog post. For the rest of you, just know that this feature helps avoid duplicate content issues with the major search engines. That’s a good thing.
Related Post
For a more in-depth description of every single setting see All in one SEO Pack configuration by Jack Leblond.
Twitter Updates
23 February 2010 at 10:17 am
Hi Liz,
Great post and reminder to check the settings after upgrading plugins.
Some will automatically update and some don’t.
I found this site that explains Canonical URL in detail: http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/2009/04/22/all-in-one-seo-pack-pagerank/
23 February 2010 at 5:18 pm
I took a screen capture of my current settings, in case it happens again. Thanks for the link on Canonical URLs.
24 February 2010 at 11:18 am
Liz,
Thanks for (another) link – it’s much appreciated.
The “Canonical URL” setting is a way to tell Google (and hopefully other engines someday) what the proper URL for a post on your site is. By default, most blogging and e-commerce platforms provide multiple ways to get to any given post or product. Each of those will often alter the URL to the post so that you may have the following scenario:
domain.com/post
domain.com/tags/post
domain.com/category/post
domain.com/archive/date/post
or
domain.com/products/new/product
domain.com/products/colors/red/product
domain.com/products/womens/product
Each of those individual URLs all deliver exactly the same content. That’s known as duplicate content and search engines don’t like it. The Canonical URL tells Google that no matter what URL they found the page at, only index and display this one.
Google has said they understand and can deal with these types of URLs, however they are also the driving force behind the use of Canonical URLs so it seems logical that we should use them.
Hope this helps you & your readers understand them better. If not, feel free to stop by my site or drop me a line.
Jack
24 February 2010 at 11:59 am
Hey, that’s a great idea (the screencapture), one I will use with my own blog too.
You have some good content on this site.
Thanks for sharing!
24 February 2010 at 1:45 pm
@Jack,
Your comment is almost a post. Thanks for adding further clarification on Canonical URLs.
@Laura
Yes, screen captures can save precious time.
Thank you both for stopping by!