Yesterday, we released Genesis 1.3, our most significant release yet! And the single most important aspect of this new release is the SEO improvements. In fact, it’s such a giant leap forward in this space that some things had to be entirely rewritten.
Special thanks goes out to Greg Boser, one of the most well known and respected SEO experts in the field. When we approached him about doing an independent Genesis SEO audit, he was more than willing to help out. His input and feedback proved to be invaluable in taking Genesis SEO to the next level. We’re confident that his suggestions have made Genesis 1.3 into the best option in search engine optimized WordPress themes.
Let’s get to the details…
More Doctitle Control
The doctitle is critical in your efforts to serve search engines the most relevant information about your web page, and therefore being able to control this element, in nearly every context, is extremely important.
In Genesis 1.3, you can now control the doctitle on the homepage, individual posts and pages, category archives, tag archives, custom taxonomy archives, etc.
Also, on new installs (or if you reset your SEO settings), we’ve made the “Append Site Name to Doctitle on inner pages” option off by default. By having this option off, your inner pages are controlled 100% by you. When every character is precious, and keywords are crucial, this control is FAR more flexible than any auto-generated option.
Document Head Control
By default, WordPress puts a bunch of extra code in your document <head> that, in most cases, you just don’t need. And by having it there, you’re just making your site serve up more HTML, which in turn, takes longer for your visitors to download. Even Google has said they are now taking page download speed into account when determining rankings.
So now, YOU control what shows up in your document <head>! By default, everything is turned off. But if there’s something you want/need in there, feel free to turn it back on. It’s YOUR site!!!
Page Speed
Speaking of download speed, another thing that oftentimes slows down a site is unnecessary linebreaks, tabs, etc. Genesis 1.3 gets rid of a LOT of wasted space in the document source, so your site will be even more snappy!
And of course, our internal tests show that Genesis is still the fastest, most efficient WordPress theme framework available. What? You didn’t know that? Yep.
This is, by far, the most noticeable improvement in Genesis 1.3. We give you all the control you need, while selecting optimal defaults for you, should you be unfamiliar with SEO.
(If you’ve already installed Genesis, just reset the SEO settings to get the new, optimized, defaults)
We’re now offering universal noindex and noarchive controls for archive pages from the SEO Settings page, as well as individual controls over noindex, nofollow, and noarchive for the homepage, individual posts and pages, and individual category, tag, and taxonomy archives.
Also worth mentioning, we’ve added the ability to apply noodp and noydir tags (both on by default) to your site to keep search engines from using titles and descriptions from the Open Directory Project and the Yahoo! Directory.
Canonical Control
If the Robots Meta controls were the most noticeable addition to Genesis 1.3, the Canonical control will have, arguably, the most impact. We wrote this bit from scratch to give you the absolute best setup possible. From the Genesis SEO audit, Greg Boser says this:
“[Canonicalization] truly has the most bang for the buck for the power user.”
With that in mind, we sought to utilize the canonical tag to optimize your site so that the correct pages show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) every time.
First of all, all paginated pages (e.g. http://yoursite.com/page/2) will use the canonical tag to point search engines back to the main page (or page 1, if we’re talking about archives), by default. So, instead of noindexing pages 2 and beyond, and letting the search engine decide the qualitative significance of pages on your site, we’re actually controlling that ourselves by telling the to pass that significance back to page 1.
If you decide to deselect this option, paginated archives will be noindexed instead, but the links will still be followed. This setting will be suboptimal for the vast majority of users, but appropriate for some, so we wanted to give the option. If in doubt, just trust the default setup.
We also added the ability to specify your own canonical URI on individual posts and pages. There are many scenarios where this would be useful, but take this one as an example, from Greg Boser:
“Quite often a date-stamped blog post will rank well and get a lot of links, but over time the ranking will slip because Google feels that the query should not include dated material. And even if it does continue to rank well, it will typically get less traffic over time because older posts with visible date stamps tend to get clicked on less because searches don’t want something that is dated.
In those types of situations, you can move the content to a page and then add a canonical to the original blog post. That will keep the post available for people browsing the blog, but transfer credit to the page.”
That is extremely powerful!
Archives and noindex
By default, Genesis 1.3 will noindex all of your archives (category, tag, author, date, search). It won’t change your options on sites that already have Genesis installed, but even in those cases, we recommend that you take a look at your strategy. Consider this, from Greg Boser:
“A high volume of nearly-identical content can be quite problematic when it comes to Google assessing the overall quality of your site. This is especially true for newer sites. So It shouldn’t be about picking which type is indexed by default, it should be about deciding how much is indexed by default.”
In other words, be very particular in the archive types you choose to have indexed, because by having them indexed, you are taking away qualitative significance from other pages on your site. However, if your category archives are actually quite useful to your visitors, and are relevant for your targeted keywords, feel free to have them indexed. As I mentioned in the Canonical Control section, we help you out by making sure your paginated archives point back to page 1, by default.
Post and Page Tracking/Conversion Code box
You’ll notice that, when editing a post or page, you now have the option of inserting some custom tracking/conversion code. This code will only output on that particular post or page, which makes it perfect for goal conversion code offered by services like Google Analytics.
Link nofollow Settings
We decided to deprecate these settings, due to authoritative information specifying that nofollowing internal links provides no SEO value. For more information on this topic, see this post by Matt Cutts.
Based on this good authority, we felt like it would be confusing to our users to leave the option intact on the SEO Settings page. It gives the impression that the options have some sort of significance, when they don’t.
3rd Party Feed Links
If you use a service like Feedburner to handle feed tracking for your site, you now have the option of entering that custom feed URI into a box on the Theme Settings page, and choosing whether or not you’d like to redirect your default feeds to the custom feed URI. (Yay! No need for a plugin!!!)
This does two things: 1) It replaces your default feed URI in the document <head> so that search engines aren’t crawling through an unused feed. 2) It allows your users to subscribe to the proper feed.
Usability + SEO = WIN!
Also, when you turn off comments and trackbacks on posts/pages, Genesis will disable the post/page comment feed link in the <head>. It’s unnecessary, and gives search engines the incorrect impression that you want these feeds crawled, when you don’t.
Genesis 1.3 is definitely our most ambitious release so far. I think the feature additions are going to net you real results in your quest for traffic and search engine domination! If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the forum, or @nathanrice on Twitter. And if you aren’t already a Genesis customer, go pick yourself up a copy!
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“StudioPress reached out to me to do a security review before Genesis was even released, and I did another review for Genesis 1.3. They were very responsive to my suggestions, and the result is a theme framework that follows all the WordPress security best practices. It’s clear StudioPress made security a priority when developing Genesis and from a security standpoint, Genesis 1.3 is at the top of its class.”
