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All In One SEO Is My Culprit

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 20, 2009

When last we left, I was telling you about some of the plugin problems I was having after upgrading to WordPress 2.9. In my parting shot, I said that it was possible that my problem was having an older theme that might be messing with everything I was trying to do.

I run a theme called Simple Balance, and the version I had was 2.1. I run that theme on two of my blogs, and I love it because I found it easy to customize, though many people might not. Still, the one thing I was missing that was irritating me was the check box, and 2.1 was an older theme.

I decided to see if there was an update to the theme, and there was, Simple Balance 2.2. It said that if you loaded it over what you currently had that it would show the checkbox for people subscribing to comments, and it was also more compatible with WordPress 2.8, which we’re obviously past by now.

I figured this was what I needed, so I downloaded the file and uploaded parts of it. By that, I mean when I was reading the page, it said something about if you were upgrading you could just copy all the files and it wouldn’t erase anything unless you had made changes to the theme. Well, I had made some changes to the theme, so a full upload wasn’t going to get it done for me.

First thing I did was copy my theme from the website to my computer so that I could reverse any changes that didn’t go well. Then I uploaded files I hadn’t changes, along with new files. I then went into files where I had made changes, did a big comparison with what was in each file, and only changed certain things manually.

What happened? Nothing really changed at all. It still showed me as being on 2.1, and I still had no check box. I decided then to try something a bit more radical. I decuded to just copy over the entire file to see what happened. Since I had backed up the original theme with my changes to my computer, I figured if anything went really askew I could fix it.

I did that and looked at everything. Very few things changed, and all the settings I already had on my blog stayed the same as well; yeah!

Now it was time to look for that check box, but I still couldn’t find it. I’m not sure what the deal is, but it just didn’t come up as part of the theme or WordPress software like it was supposed to.

Now I was back at square one again, but I wondered about something. When I was talking about plugins in the other post, I mentioned how I had added back All In One SEO and how things didn’t work with it. I wondered if I deactivated that one plugin what would happen.

I deactivated it and everything came back except Other WordPress News. I mean almost everything. Broken Link Checker still doesn’t work, but every other plugin works again. So, I was able to put Subscribe To Comments back, as well as WP-Cumulus, and it all works great.

So, it turned out All In One SEO was the culprit. I kind of liked that program, but I had remembered some time back that there had been some discussions as to whether it really benefited you or not. After all, if you do your SEO properly, if you can, that should work just as well, right? Also, for what it’s worth, both Google and Yahoo said they don’t look at meta keywords anymore, and that’s what All In One SEO mainly did, right?

I went online to check some things out. I came across this post entitled What’s Wrong With All In One SEO Plugin, but it’s promoting a different SEO product instead. I came across another post titled All In One Update Extremely Dangerous where it talked about something set by default that, if you don’t know about it, could really kill your blogs search engine position. It also talks about all these people who use the Thesis theme and love the SEO aspects of it, but says that it pretty much locks you into it forever because the day you decide you want a different theme every post you’ve ever done anything with using Thesis loses all the SEO it created for you.

I continued doing some research online, and it seems other people have had problems with this plugin (which I’m now going to call AIO SEO), but for different reasons. Some people have found themselves losing page rank because of something called canonical url. Some have found that their meta tag words disappear. And a few have found that they’ve had some plugin issues. But it doesn’t seem like there’s this big outcry about it.

Too bad for me, I thought. I was ready to kill the plugin for that and other reasons. One was the constant updates; that’s quite irritating. The other was having the plugin keep making you have to activate it after updating it. The third was being hit immediately with their request for donations; it’s big and hard to miss.

Just as I was going to delete it, I noticed they had another update. My first reaction was “ugh, not again.” But I decided to see what the update said, and of all things it addressed problems with other plugins. So I figured what the heck, and upgraded it. This time, it didn’t ask me to go and enable it. I decided to take a look, and I saw that they had changed the settings so that it’s automatically enabled. Then I looked at my dashboard, and saw that it had brought back the WordPress Development Blog and the Incoming Links. Those were the two most important to me, so I’ve decided to keep it for a little while longer, but keep my eyes on it.

That’s on this blog. On the one I’ve upgraded to 2.9, it brought back Incoming Links, but that’s it. So, I’m not totally sold on it yet, and I’ll probably have to wait to see what happens when I upgrade this blog. I think I see at least one more post on AIO SEO coming; let’s hope it’s much shorter than these last two. And, as you can see, I threw in a picture just to break things up. Of course, it’s through Imagekind, which means you can purchase a print if you like it.

Overall, though, it proves just how important it is to keep testing your stuff when things are working properly. If you check your stuff and your dashboard is having problems, deactivate AIO SEO to see if that resolves anything. Then decide what you’d prefer to do afterwards.

WordPress 2.9 Upgrade; My Issues

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 19, 2009

Hey, wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago that we had to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.6? No matter; now it’s time for WordPress 2.9, and I’ll first say I wasn’t necessarily happy about doing it, but I knew I’d have to test it eventually. So, I upgraded my finance blog; here’s where I am with it.

As you know, automatic upgrades don’t work with me, and WP is saying it’s my hosts fault. So be it; I have a FTP, so I went that route with it. The update itself went pretty well. Of course, before you do any update you always deactivate all plugins.

Then I came back and it said I had to upgrade the database, but that took less than 5 seconds after clicking the button. I went into the dashboard to look around, and all looked pretty good.

Now it was time to activate my plugins. And, as it figures, there were problems. The first problem right off the bat is that WordPress 2.9 is supposed to show you more information regarding your plugins and whether they’re compatible or not. I don’t have that, and I can’t find where I’m supposed to activate it, if that’s what you’re supposed to do. I’m already not a happy camper.

I first activated all that I’d had activated beforehand. Many of the items on the dashboard wouldn’t work anymore. I deactivated them all then started doing them one by one. If one worked, I left it alone and went to the next one. When I was finished testing in that fashion, I now have 4 plugins that won’t work with that site that worked before. Well, let me qualify that. Three of them will work, but mess up the admin. The fourth isn’t working, and it’s giving me an error message. That’s irksome, to say the least.

But y’all know I like to be a bit more thorough than that when I can be. So, I deactivated all my plugins except Askimet and CommentLuv; I knew those two were always absolutely safe. Then it was time to test the plugins that supposedly wouldn’t work at all.

The first one I tested is a plugin called WP-Cumulus. If you look at the bottom right of this blog you see that circling tag cloud. I can’t remember who told me about that, but I like it instead of that long list of tags. It was the program where it was giving me all these error messages. On its own, it’s working on that blog, but it took out the information I was getting in the “Other WordPress News” area.

The second one I tested was Twitter Tools, where I only use one of the 4 options you are given. Running it on its own, it does the same as WP-Cumulus.

The third one I tested was Whydowork Adsense, which I had said I removed from all my blogs, but I hadn’t removed it from that one. Once again, on its own, it works just like the two above.

The last one is Limit Login Attempts, which I’ve talked about recently. It did the same thing as the other three; freaky, right?

As a quick test, I decided to try one more thing. I wanted to see how these things worked if I removed CommentLuv. Limit Login Attempts, Whydowork Adsense and WP-Cumulus all work perfectly; Twitter Tools still shuts down Other WordPress News.

What this points out is that it’s not necessarily one plugin that’s messing everything up, but the compatibility between certain plugins that messes stuff up; heck! That means I now have to figure out which plugins I really want, and what stuff I don’t necessarily care about in the dashboard. I have to admit that I’d never seen Other WordPress News on any of my blogs, and now that I see it there’s a lot of good stuff I’d love to be seeing all the time. But that would be the one I’d have to sacrifice to use most of my other plugins, which I am going to use because they help my blog work better. Decisions, decisions.

I decided to leave WP-Cumulus for the time being and add other plugins one by one to see what might still work well. The first one I added back was Feedburner Smith, which of course runs the Feedburner RSS subscription service; works well together.

Then I added the DoFollow plugin, a must if you want to be able to make your blog, well, a dofollow blog, which helps to encourage comment participation. Everything is still perfect.

Next was to add the Webreader plugin, which is also known as Read Speaker. Now is where there’s the compatibility issue; it was good while it lasted. However, for the moment, I remove this plugin to see if the next one will mess with me also.

The one I add back is All In One SEO, and it definitely won’t work with that one. Now I know that it’s not going to play well with the big boys, but I really want AIO SEO. So I remove WP-Cumulus, only to discover that I still don’t have Other WordPress News. So, that one’s about to be the odd man out, because I need to get many of my plugins back onto that blog.

Back goes CommentLuv. Back goes Google XML Sitesmap. Back goes Limit Login Attempts. Back goes NoSelf Pings, which I’ve never written about, but it works great if you do a lot of internal linking, which I do, and keeps you from pinging yourself all the time.

I add Subscribe To Comments back, and now I have an issue. It takes out the Plugins category in the Dashboard. I want that, so I remove it for the time being and push forward.

I add back Webreader. I add back Twitter Tools; heck, that took out both Plugins and WordPress Development Blog. Nope, I want those, so I remove it for the moment.

On a fluke I decide to see what happens if I load Broken Link Checker. It takes out everything, but finds two broken links. I’ll come back to the links later, but this one easily gets removed again.

I add back WP-Cumulus. I add back Whydowork Adsense. All is pretty okay.

This leaves me with two plugins I want that don’t play well with others; Subscribe To Comments and Twitter Tools. And I’m stuck. People have to be able to subscribe to comments, otherwise why would they leave a comment? That’s the problem with having an older theme, no matter how cool it is. So, for now, it’s there, and I lose those Dashboard things. And since I’ve lost those, Twitter Tools is also back, as I also feel I need that one.

The message here is that it just might be the theme that’s messing you up as much as the plugin; what a drag. Still, I hope all this testing I’ve done helps you out with your blog.

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