SEO Siloing WordPress Plugin
This post introduces the SEO Siloing WordPress plugin, which is used to create an SEO Siloing site structure for your blog.
Prerequisites
This plugin should work with WordPress 2.0 and up, including WordPress 2.3 with its major overhaul of the category structure. It may also work with older versions, but I haven't tried it.
You would normally only use this plugin if you have defined the permalink structure for your blog to include the category name as described in Easy SEO Siloing for WordPress Users. In other words, all your postings use the form /%category%/%postname%/ for their permalinks. This isn't a requirement, though, but it's a recommendation. You can actually use the plugin on any page or post, but if you use it on a non-page you have to explicitly give it a category to display.
Installation
Like all WordPress plugins, this one's very easy to install. Download the seosiloing-1.2.zip file, extract the seosiloing.php file and place it in your blog's wp-content/plugins folder. Then open the WordPress administration console and activate the plugin.
Using the SEO Siloing Plugin
The plugin's primary purpose (so far) is to create category landing pages, which are static pages with links to all the postings in a given category. You can, however, use it to create pages with lists of posts in any category. You can even use the plugin in posts, but you'll have to explicitly specify a category name/ID.
For each category in your blog, create a static page (not a post) whose “post slug” (the name of the file) exactly matches the “category slug” of the category. By default, the category slug is the name of the category converted to all lowercase and with hyphens replacing spaces. For example, the “List Building” category's slug is “list-building”. You can view a category's slug from the Categories page under the Manage option of the admin console.
Place the following HTML comment somewhere in the body of the page:
<!-- seosiloing-category-posts -->
Save the page. When accessed, the page will create a list of posts from the matching category.
You can also force posts from a specific category to be displayed by using this syntax:
<!-- seosiloing-category-posts#name –>
Replace name with the name or the ID of the category you want displayed. For example:
<!-- seosiloing-category-posts#general -->
This syntax lets you use the plugin within posts.
If the category cannot be found, a customizable error message is displayed. A customizable message is also displayed if no posts exist in the category.
Note: The normal category pages are still available via the usual /category/name/ syntax and those pages are untouched by this plugin. The point of the plugin is to create landing pages within the same URL hierarchy as the posts themselves.
Customizing the Output
Under the Options menu in the administration console you'll see a new entry for the SEO Siloing plugin that lets you set various options, including what to sort the posts by (title is the default).
Feel free to report any bugs/enhancements to me.
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35 Responses to “SEO Siloing WordPress Plugin”
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[…] http://www.memwg.com/seo-siloing-wordpress-plugin/ […]
[…] SEO Siloing to build lists of posts by category […]
[…] http://www.memwg.com/seo-siloing-wordpress-plugin/ […]
I use this plugin and it works well, i made a litte modification, cause i need to display a list of post title in static page and in bottom of each post, per category. So i modified seosiloing-category-posts function by mark the is_page(), to make the list in bottom of each post.
I still hope that i could display the list of post each category per user/author.
Is there any possibilities to do that?
Thanks a lots.
If I understand you correctly, you want to be able to subdivide the list of posts in each category by author as well?
I have a static page for each author, i need to display the list of posts for each of them.
I hope you have function like this :
or
Thanks.
Ups,
i mean <!– seosiloing-category-posts#authos_name –> or
i mean <!– seosiloing-category-posts#authos_id –>
[…] This should be mixed with custom query string which would allow you to have a different number of posts on your front page compared to various archive pages. Ideally when siloing you would want to list all pages under a particular category or tag page. The easier alternative is the siloing plugin. […]
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This plug-in no longer works with Wordpress 2.3.1.
Any future updates to this plug-in expected?
Hmm, I’ll take a look and see what’s changed. I’m sure I can get it to work again…
OK Thanks.
[…] SEO Siloing This plug in basically optimizes your site for a search engine optimization technique called Siloing. To explain SEO siloing would take a post in itself. […]
Hi, the error on SeoSiloing and wp 2.3.x is that table wp_categories has been eliminated from the wp code.
Unfortunately I am not so expert on WordPress and PHP coding, so I cannot fix it.
Please let me know if there are updates
thanks!
PS I added a feature on the plugin I had on my site, that is, write next to the post title if there are comments
if the post has no comments, the title will be for example:
“new ringtones have been uploaded”
if there is one, or more comments, it says:
“new ringtones have been uploaded (x comments)” where “x” is the number of comments for the article.
let me know about the categories!
I have just recently upgraded to the latest wordpress version and found that the siloing plugin is not working. Can anyone direct me how to upgrade the plugin for the latest version of the wordpress.
If the plugin cannot be upgraded it would be gr8 to know the version that i can downgrade to make the plugin work.
Are there any other alternative silo plugin for Wordpress 2.3.2
I’m going to update the plugin this week, so just hang on… they changed the database structure in 2.3, I just need to figure out how to support older versions as well.
WOW… This is great news. Am looking forward to your update. Thanks a lot.
Great news indeed. Unfortunately I have removed this plugin from the upgraded version last week. I will re-install if we can get the update this week.
Regards,
R
Aargh, why did the wise minds at WP not leave the wp_categories table in as a read-only view so as to not break half the plugins in existence? Stupid, stupid, stupid… this will take a bit more work than I thought, otherwise my plugin won’t work with older versions. But that’s my problem, isn’t it…?
Eric
Eric…. i dont want to pressurize you… but is there any quick fix to make the plugin work for 2.3.1 as i am worried about google bots crawling through my site and find the landing pages missing. I am sorry if am asking too much…..
Prashant, I just sent you an updated plugin that should work. If it’s good, I’ll release it to everyone once I get a version of it that works in all 2.x versions of WordPress.
Hi, let me give you a suggestion: why don’t you keep 1.1 for 2.x (older than 2.3) and the updated one for 2.3.x? I saw many plugin sites recommending “keep older version if you are running older platforms”… PS if you can, send the updated version to me too. thanks a lot.
No need. Version 1.2 of the plugin, which I released a couple of days ago, supports all WP 2.x versions, including 2.3. It’s simpler to maintain one version. I’ve updated the post to reflect this information, as well as the download link.
Eric thanks a lot…. The new plugin is working perfectly… and to cnfirm your last comment its backward compatible for other WP 2.x versions….. Keep up the good work…
Hi, I updated SeoSiloing and it really seems to work.
I’d like to share the enhancement I made, to display the number of comments that have been left for a post, next to the title.
under the line:
foreach( $posts as $post ) :
this line:
$t_out .= ‘‘ .
$post->post_title . ‘‘;
must be replaced with this if…else implementation:
if($post->comment_count == ‘0′) {
$t_out .= ‘‘ .
$post->post_title . ‘‘;
} else {
$t_out .= ‘‘ .
$post->post_title . ‘ (’ . $post->comment_count . ‘ comments)‘; }
This instruction, just tells the plug-in to behave as Eric has written originally, if on the post there is no comment.
Otherwise, if the comment count is bigger than 0, it shows the title like this:
Post title (1 comments)
post title (2 comments)
Sorry for the formatting of the code, I am totally blind so I left less spaces as I could, to check better with my Braille display if the code was correct!
I did this enhancement because I need something like this, for accessibility reasons. That is:
The posts appear as a list, a normal HTML unordered list. So, it’s very very easy for my assistive technology to reach them; pressing the l key (l for list) the screen reader jumps from a list to another, till I find the list of posts. Then, with the “i” key (i for item) I jump from a list item, in this case post title, to another, so my assistive technology just reads the title and then immediately says if it has had some responses!
well, as the site is mine, it’s my blog, I really wish to know as soon as possible if others have commented!
Otherwise, without this, with the standard template I should jump, using the tab key, from a post to another, if there are tags too, and then read …”0 comments”!
Thanks to seo-siloing I can save time!
If you want, Eric, you can implement the enhancement, I could upload it somewhere in txt or zip format so other people can get it!
I am not so skilled in PHP, but of course I can get what I need
sorry if my site (clicking on my nickname) is Italian only…it would be very difficult to translate and to find the same ringtones and jingles in foreign languages too
so I have just decided to leave it in my mother language
thanks for help
PS: could I suggest it as a “recommended plugin”, with or without enhancement, to other blind wordpress users?
oh my god…the a href code has been coded in HTML! Eric, if you can, edit the response correctly…
I just have published it in txt format it’s here, if people need the enhancement
http://www.audiomontaggi.net/seosiloing.txt
[…] SEO Siloing WordPress Plugin - The plugin’s primary purpose (so far) is to create category landing pages, which are static pages with links to all the postings in a given category. You can, however, use it to create pages with lists of posts in any category. You can even use the plugin […]
Nice wordpress plugin, i like it!
Someday I hope to contribute to a discussion like this based on my skills and knowledge … but for today a reminder of an easy to make mistake is all I cna offer. I saw the announcement of the upgraded plugin a couple weks ago and immediately downloaded it into the folder where the original version has bene unpacked.
Today I finally got ’round to implementingit on one site. Hmm … wouldn’t work … couldn’t find any posts to display … try this, try that, guess I’ll have to put in a clal to eric for landholding … avoided a public display of dumbness however, just.
Can anyone guess what I did wrong? Yep. Never deleted the old version code and unpacked and uploaded the v 1.2 code. Gosh, it’s amazing how well it works when you use the right .php code. Thanks, Eric … and if anyone is convinced the plugin really doesn’t work … delete everything and start from scratch … a newer version .zip file won’t do anything if you don’t unpack it an use the updated code. Duh.
[…] Don’t forget to check out my SEO Siloing plugin as […]
Hi Eric,
Is there any way of showing the post excerpt under each post link?
This is a Great plugin by the way.
Kind Regards
SR
Can somebody explain how this plugin is any different that a standard WordPress category page? If I understand what the plugin does, it outputs all the posts of a particular category to a page. Isn’t that what a category page does? Thanks.
Looks like a great plugin.I was wondering if it works with wordpress 2.5.1 because i can’t get it to work on my site. The html comments don’t work.Thank you
Hmm… I haven’t tried it with WP 2.5.1 yet. I’ll try to do that in the next few days and if there’s a problem I’ll be sure to fix it.