SolSEO

Changelog

2.5.1

The answer to the third wordpress.org review. Every value a form sends is now
sanitised by a WordPress function on the line that reads it: the robots.txt
rules and the profile addresses through wp_strip_all_tags(), which keeps their
lines and percent encoded characters, before SolSEO’s own checks run. The
Titles, Writing and Tools screens read each field with its own sanitiser rather
than the whole form at once. Redirects copied from another plugin have their
targets cleaned as addresses, and reading that plugin’s table can no longer
print a database error.

2.5.0

Moving from another SEO plugin now brings its category and tag fields across
with the pages: titles, descriptions, canonicals, focus keywords, and whether a
category is kept out of search. A field SolSEO already holds on a category is
never replaced. The import’s check covers categories too, so the offer to switch
the other plugin off waits until they are all across. Redirects kept in the
other plugin’s own table can be copied into SolSEO’s, from the Import tab or the
last step of setup, with a list of what each one will do first. Rules that
matched part of an address come across as patterns that answer the same
addresses, one already here is left as it is, and one that cannot work here is
named with the reason. Both read the other plugin’s data whether or not it is
still switched on. A page’s automatic description no longer picks up a form’s
“please enable JavaScript” line, its labels or its button.

2.4.0

WooCommerce products and categories can drop /product/ and /product-category/
from their addresses, so /product-category/string-wax/ becomes /string-wax/.
The two switches are under Titles and Meta, on the Post types and Taxonomies
tabs, and both start off. A third removes parent categories from a
subcategory’s address. The old addresses send a permanent redirect to the new
ones, and canonicals, sitemaps and breadcrumbs print the new ones. A page keeps
its address when a product or category shares its name, and a product keeps it
over a category, so switching on never hides a page. A site moving from an SEO
plugin that already removed these keeps them removed: SolSEO reads that
plugin’s setting once, when it is first activated. /sitemap_index.xml now sends
a permanent redirect to /sitemap.xml when nothing else on the site answers it.

2.3.5

Saving one tab of Titles and Meta no longer switches off settings on another.
Saving the Social tab turned off structured data, the site search box,
breadcrumbs and the search results noindex from the General tab, and saving
General turned off Open Graph and card tags from Social. Each tab now saves
only the switches it shows. If you saved either tab on 2.3.4 or earlier, open
both and check the ticks.

2.3.4

The answer to the second wordpress.org review, plus the audit that followed it.
The sitemap’s browser view carries no CSS at all, so nothing is printed outside
the enqueue system. Every request value is sanitised on the line that reads it
and every output is escaped where it is printed. The Google callback writes
nothing without a live handshake. The role map is enforced on every path that
saves SEO fields, SQL lists use placeholders, the crawler verifies certificates,
and deleting the plugin with “remove my data” ticked now removes every table,
option and stored credential, and tells Google to forget the permission.

2.3.3

No node in the structured data can point at a node that is not there. 2.3.2
fixed the one case Search Console had reported, the home page naming a
breadcrumb list it did not have. This release makes the rule general: after
every builder and every filter has run, any reference to an id that no node in
the graph carries is removed. An author reference to a person who has since
been deleted, or a reference left behind by an add-on that replaced a node,
can no longer reach the page as an empty item that Google reports as a missing
field. Pages whose references all resolve, which is every page on a normal
site, print exactly what they printed before.

2.3.2

The home page no longer points at a breadcrumb trail it does not have. A trail
needs two crumbs and the front page has one, so no BreadcrumbList was written
there, but the WebPage node still named “#breadcrumb” as its breadcrumb. Google
reads a reference to an id nothing else carries as an empty BreadcrumbList, and
Search Console reported the home page as missing itemListElement. The page node
now names a breadcrumb only when the list is in the same graph. Every other
page is unchanged.

2.3.1

The WooCommerce shop page prints the title and description typed on it. The
shop is drawn at the address of a real page, and that page has the SolSEO
meta box, but the query calls the view an archive, so what was typed there was
never read and the shop showed “Shop – Sitename” whatever the editor said. The
shop archive now carries its page, the way the blog home already carried its,
so title, description, robots and social tags all come from the page. Every
other archive is unchanged.

2.3.0

A page title can no longer break the structured data. The JSON-LD block was
written with forward slashes left unescaped, so a title, description or product
field holding the six characters of a closing script tag ended the block early
and everything after it in that field went onto the page as markup. The graph is
now written so that neither half of a tag can appear in it. Nothing is deleted:
the words a person typed are still in the graph, and a search engine reads the
same page it always did.

The admin stylesheet no longer reaches WordPress’ own screens. Its colours were
declared on the document, so every screen that loaded it handed nine SolSEO
values to everything else drawn there, and it loaded on the Dashboard, the posts
list, the editor and the term screen whether or not there was anything of ours
on them. The colours are now declared on this plugin’s own elements, and the
stylesheet loads on a screen only when this plugin has drawn something on it:
the Dashboard only with one of its panels turned on, a posts list only for a
post type it manages, a term screen only for a taxonomy it manages.

The robots.txt rules ask WordPress where the admin is instead of assuming. A
site in a subdirectory, or one whose admin folder has been moved, was getting a
rule for a folder that does not exist and an Allow line that did not cover
admin-ajax.php. Both lines now come from the address WordPress reports.

The sitemap stylesheet is a file. It used to be written into the transform,
which meant a browser fetched it again with every sitemap it drew.

Four links that had gone dead now point at pages that exist: ByteDance’s own
page about its crawler, Hotjar’s tracking code guide, the ATO on tax invoices,
and two ACCC pages behind the Australian checks. The readme also now says, in
the External services section, that the crawler and compliance tables carry
links to other people’s documentation and that this plugin fetches none of them.

2.2.0

The score in the editor now matches the audit. The editor analysis and the
checks that run on the SolSEO service had each grown their own copy of the same
rules and drifted apart, so a description could be written at a length the
editor accepted and then reported as too long by the same company’s check. The
alt text rule in the accessibility panel and the one in the SEO panel disagreed
with each other in the same editor. All of them now read one definition.

An empty alt attribute is read as an answer rather than as a missing one. A
decorative image is meant to carry an empty alt, and pages were being marked
down for doing it correctly.

2.1.0

The dashboard widget is about this site and nothing else. It used to list every
site on the connected SolSEO account, so a site built for a client showed that
client the names and scores of every other site on the account. It now shows
this one.

The panel’s five sections are now also panels of their own: content score, what
needs work, site health and keywords, site monitoring, and pages worth fixing.
They start switched off. The Screen Options tab at the top of the Dashboard
turns any of them on, for you and not for everybody else on the site.

The widget also says a good deal more: how the pages are spread across the
score bands, how many have never been scored, how many have no search summary,
how many are hidden from search, and anything switched on that stops the site
being found at all. A connected site adds its health score and the change since
the audit before, its tracked keyword count, when it was last audited, and,
where monitoring is on, whether the site is answering, how long the certificate
has left and whether the sitemap works.

2.0.2

Switching off the other SEO plugin after an import now switches off its paid
add-on at the same time. Before this, only the free plugin went off and the
add-on kept running with nothing underneath it, which took the whole site down
until somebody switched the first one back on.

The import screen also stops reloading itself. A finished run reloaded the page
once to show what it had unlocked, then the reloaded page saw the same finished
run and reloaded again, over and over.

2.0.0

Connect your Google Search Console account and see what each page actually did
in Google over the last twenty eight days, in the editor, beside the page you
are writing: clicks, impressions, average position, and the searches that
brought them. The permission asked for is read only. If you would rather
solseo.com.au were not in the middle of the connection, paste a client id and
secret from your own Google Cloud project and it will not be.

A product page no longer carries two Product descriptions. When SolSEO’s
structured data is on and it describes the product, WooCommerce’s own copy is
left out, so a search engine sees one product with one rating. A filter,
solseo_schema_replace_woo, keeps WooCommerce’s instead. When another SEO plugin
is also publishing structured data, the Titles and Meta screen says so in one
line and asks you to turn one of them off. Add-ons can now hear when a page’s
Search Console figures have been read.

1.5.0

The free halves of six paid features: internal link suggestions you approve one
at a time, a warning when two pages go for the same phrase, a Merchant Centre
feed audit, six accessibility checks, six Australian business checks, and a
verification that your analytics tag fires once rather than twice or not at all.
Also a crawl of your own pages, the links on them that go nowhere, and what your
images cost a visitor.

1.3.1

The Upgrade screen described the add-on as adding two things over a list of
three. It no longer counts them in a sentence the list can outgrow.

1.3.0

Seven SolSEO tests in WordPress’s own Site Health screen, built from what the
plugin already knows and working with no account: whether search engines are
allowed in, readable addresses, the sitemap, structured data, pages with no
description of their own, images with no alt text, and how many pages are kept
out of search results on purpose. A SolSEO section on the Info tab lists the
version, the post types scored, whether a sitemap is served and how the scoring
stands, and none of it leaves the site.

Two places an add-on can hook into, and the image description tool can now be
pointed at the images on one page.

1.2.0

First release on wordpress.org.

A setup screen covering the five things a new site cannot guess. A panel in the block editor sidebar, opened from the score in the top right, in place of the box below the content; the classic editor keeps its box. The posts list column now carries the keyword, the structured data type and three link counts, and a pencil in its header lets you edit titles and descriptions straight from the list.

The robots.txt screen shows what your site is actually serving, offers five ready made sets of rules, records what the site served before this plugin arrived, and can put it back. Anything with a per cent encoded character in it was being silently stripped on save before now, so it is worth reopening that box.

Every bulk tool queues the whole job instead of asking you to press a button repeatedly. The importer reads four more plugins, checks itself when it finishes, and then offers to switch the other one off for you. A notice appears when another SEO plugin is writing the same tags, on three screens only, dismissible for good.

Breadcrumbs have a live preview and the prefix setting finally has a field.

1.0.0

Built, and never published.