SEO basics
Meta descriptions, social sharing tags, article structured data and cleaner indexing, for sites without an SEO plugin.
- Turn off author archives Author pages (/author/name/) redirect to the home page. On single-author sites they only repeat the blog and reveal the user name.
- Keep staging sites out of search engines On staging, development and local copies of the site, every page tells search engines not to index it. The live site isn’t touched.
- Keep search results pages out of Google Your site’s search results pages tell search engines not to index them. They’re thin, endless and a favourite of spammers who link to searches.
- Keep tag, date and author archives out of Google Tag, date and author archive pages ask search engines not to index them (links on them are still followed). Search results show your posts instead of lists of them.
- Meta description from the excerpt Posts and pages get a meta description from their excerpt (or the first words of the text), so search results show a summary you control. Skipped when an SEO plugin is active.
- Social sharing tags (Open Graph) Adds Open Graph and X card tags, so links to your posts show a title, summary and featured image on Facebook, LinkedIn, X and messaging apps. Skipped when an SEO plugin is active.
- Leave tags and authors out of the sitemap WordPress’s built-in sitemap (/wp-sitemap.xml) lists your posts, pages and categories, but not tag archives or author pages.
- Article structured data for posts Adds BlogPosting structured data (JSON-LD) to single posts: headline, dates, author, image. Helps Google understand and show your articles. Skipped when an SEO plugin is active.
- Turn off date archives Date archives (/2024/05/) redirect to the home page. Most sites never link to them, but search engines still find and crawl them.
- Ask AI crawlers not to use your content Adds lines to your robots.txt asking the crawlers that collect training data for AI models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Apple, Meta, Common Crawl, ByteDance) to stay away. Normal search engines are not affected.
- Site verification tags (Google, Bing, Pinterest, Facebook) Adds the meta tags that prove to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Pinterest and Facebook that the site is yours. Delete the lines you don’t need.
Move your snippets over this afternoon.
Importing changes nothing until you switch over, and your old shortcodes keep working.