Can it improve SEO for a Website? I suppose that’s equivalent to asking how do you drive from Los Angeles to New York City.

The user needs to understand the tool — absolutely. So that does seem to be an argument against advising everyone willy-nilly to install SEO plugins.

I’ll leave it at that, but welcome further comments if more people want to express their support for this or other SEO plugins (self-promotional schmucks will not see the light of day).

Sorry about the forced registration — I’m sure you can imagine how many self-promotional schmucks try to add noise to the signal.

Thanks to you all for commenting.

However, I felt the need to clarify what you’ve said over and over in this post: it’s the user that’s the problem and not the plugin.

I’ve been using this plugin for years on dozens of sites with great success when configured properly. I’ve also tested several of the settings and it can cause huge problems with certain settings. But wiping out the plugin doesn’t solve the problem; better knowledge does.

The original need no longer exists. And yet people are constantly adding these useless things to their sites. Does it hurt your SEO? Absolutely. Anything that leads you down the garden path of wasted time and effort hurts your SEO.

Thesis, at least, is a theme. It gave our Web team an opportunity to make our sites look less ugly than before.

I’ve yet to see any benefits from All In One or other SEO plugins that are actually beneficial.

But let us agree to disagree. I’ve expressed an opinion that is most likely going to be unseen by the 1.5 million (and growing) users of All In One.

It’s unfortunate so many people are wasting their time but all I can do is say what I’ve said.

Takeshi: “… Even Matt Cutts himself has said that the All-In-One-SEO plug-in can help.”

Michael: Matt once suggested several years ago that people could add several plugins to their Wordpress sites. In May 2009 Matt wrote a post on his blog titled SEO For Bloggers. When someone asked why he didn’t use “All In One” Matt replied:

…at WordCamp 2007 I recommended a plugin or two dedicated to SEO, but WordPress has made a lot of progress in recent years. You can certainly install stuff like the “all in one SEO pack” and it can help, but the impact tends to be less than it used to be. If you’re the kind of person that really wants to pay attention to that last few percent of details, feel free to use it. Personally, I don’t bother with it myself. That slide wasn’t “The Five Plugins You Must Install, And Install No Others.” It was just a slide to show “Hey, here are the plugins I like and have installed.”

Can it help with SEO? Highly doubtful.

To help me respond to your comment I reactivated the plugin on SEO Theory so I can take a look at an older version (we have not upgraded to the most current version).

Here are my comments on the specific options:

1. Set Home Page Title – Wordpress lets you do this.
2. Home description – Wordpress lets you do this.
3. Home Keywords – Google and Bing don’t use the Keywords meta tag and most SEOs despise it anyway, so there is no real need for this.
4. Rewrite Titles – Anyone who is using a theme like Thesis doesn’t need a plugin to specify search optimized title options. And, frankly, basic blog post titles are better optimized for search anyway.
5. Various title formats – These are user-configurable. How many people who feel the need to use an SEO plugin are going to know what the best format for a tag page title is anyway?
6. Description Format – Apparently you can add boilerplate and other templated content to description meta tags. Longer description tags don’t help with search engine optimization.
7. 404 Title Format – Search engines don’t index 404 error pages if they are properly configured.
8. Use Categories for Meta keywords – See above.
9. Use NoIndex for Categories – The help tip says this will prevent pages from being crawled. Technically, that would only work if it generated an entry in robots.txt to use a Disallow. So, no nofollow embedded by this feature (Thesis does offer to embed nofollow on internal links, but we disable that). However, people should be allowing their tag and category pages to be indexed.
10. Use NoIndex for Archives – Not that duplicate content is the “SEO issue” many people have made it out to be, if your archive pages are showing full posts rather than excerpts (an option in Thesis and possibly other themes) then excluding them from the index may help you sleep at night. It won’t help your search optimization, however.
11. Use NoIndex for Tag Archives – As perfectly useless and bad an SEO technique as using NoIndex for Categories.
12. Autogenerate Descriptions – And how exactly does this optimize for search? Meta descriptions, when optimized, should be both explanatory and compelling. Show me an autogenerated description and I’ll show you UNoptimized content.
13. Additional Post Headers – Wordpress lets you do this. But what else would you need?
14. Additional Home Headers – You got me here. But see previous point for my question about its helpfulness with search optimization.
15. Log Important Events – Might be useful for problem solving but you won’t have the problems if you don’t use the plugin.

I notice the latest version of the plugin offers URL canonicalization. That won’t help with people stealing your content unless the headers are included in the RSS feeds. And if you’re not replicating full posts in the archives then you don’t have a duplicate content issue to begin with — and if you ARE replicating full posts in the archives you only get a canonical benefit if you have exactly one post per archive.

Now, keep in mind that this article was written not just about “All In One” but all SEO plugins. I picked on “All In One” because it does seem to be a common factor in many sites that are having problems (and I have used it myself so I am not changing my mind about its issues).

Some people may be using Thesis or other themes to embed “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links. They should disable that option.

I do thank you for correcting me on an important point. I’ll be more careful in the future.

But my position concerning “All In One” and other SEO plugins remains unchanged: they are completely useless and don’t help with search optimization.

Also, All-In-One-SEO uses noindex+follow, not nofollow. So it’s not going to keep your site from getting indexed, just help avoid duplicate content issues. Even Matt Cutts himself has said that the All-In-One-SEO plug-in can help. Get your facts straight.

The SEO community has way overblown the duplicate content issue. This is another area where search engineers have told people, “Don’t worry about it. Let us figure out what is most important.”

Generally speaking, when it comes to organizing content for search engines, the SEO community really sucks. They just don’t listen to the people who really know what the score is.

If noindex isnt applied to tag and category pages, will there be the issue of duplicate content?