As I was thinking about how to write about the new features in Thesis 1.7, I was having trouble coming up with some way to make my comments not seem totally random. Then I finally realized that was because the new features are, themeselves, pretty random.
I get the sense that Chris Pearson, the Thesis creator, wanted to play around with his coding skills to see what kind of cool things he could do with them and he picked areas that were personally interesting/important to him—not necessarily to his customers. That's fine—it's his baby after all—but that means that while a lot of the things that have been changed may be useful for more advanced users of the theme, I don't think new users will necessarily get much out of them. (Of course, all the original benefits of Thesis still exist...)
Given that, I've decided to write about the new features in the same order they're listed on the New Feature List page on the DIYthemes site. For this post, I'm just going to focus on the Insane new SEO controls and detail, which are described as follows:
Thesis has always been optimized and ready to perform in the search engines, but there were still some areas where exacting, precise controls were lacking. Not anymore. Version 1.7 contains a totally redesigned document <head> that allows for SEO customization at a level that no one has ever seen before. With 1.7, you’ll be able to control the robots <meta> tags (noindex, nofollow, noarchive) on every post and page of your site, and better still, the new Page Options will give you total control over all these details and more on your Category and Tag archive pages! Optimize everything, because that’s how you win on the Web, and that’s what Thesis is all about.
Now, I need to preface my comments on the new SEO (search engine optimization) features by saying that I have a different take on SEO than a lot of people. I do agree there are some things you must do from a coding perspective to ensure your pages are effectively found by search engines. But I believe the most important element of SEO—by far—is ensuring that your pages have useful and relevant content for the keywords people type into those search engines. After all, there's no point in having them come to your site only to leave immediately because the info's not what they were looking for. And no amount of SEO "tricks" can fix that.
By this standard, Thesis already provided the most important things you need for SEO—the Custom Title Tag, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords fields that you can customize on each individual post and page screen. These let you specify exactly what you want to appear in those three sections of your page <head>. I highly recommend people fill out these fields for each and every post and page because search engines use them to not only determine whether or not to serve up the page based on the keywords entered, but also to provide the text to display in the search results (which helps people decide if the page is actually going to give them the information they're looking for).
Earlier versions of Thesis also let you set these fields for your home page and that option still exists in version 1.7, although it's moved to the new Page Options screen. But now you also have the option to add this information to each of your category and tag pages. For example, I have a T4L category page that lists all my Thesis posts. By default, the title tag is simply the category name—in this case, Thesis —and there is no field for description or meta tags. This screen now gives me the option to add and customize those fields, just like I could with the home page.
And this is where it loses me. Although there's obviously some value in having archive pages come up in search engine results (I'd like T4L to be known as a site with lots of useful information about Thesis), I'm not sure each page needs its own level of customization. I mean, what can you really say about an archive page other than "This is a list of posts about X"? That could easily have been built into Thesis as the default. And if you did want certain archive pages to have more detailed descriptions, that's a pretty easy custom function to write (using the WordPress wp_head hook to add it into the <head> section).
Having more options in and of itself is not a bad thing—in fact, I'm usually arguing for it. For me the issue here is around opportunity cost, i.e. what features could have been added to Thesis 1.7 that would have provided more value to more people than these? (I'll be writing a post about what I think were missed at the end of this series.) The other problem is if you happen to have a lot of categories or tags, this screen can take a really long time to load, since there's a panel for each one. That's not a huge deal, however, since you're not likely to be going into it all that often.
Note: If you have created categories or tags but haven't applied them to any posts yet, they will not appear in the list. And when you're starting a brand new site, there won't be any items in the Tag Page Options, which can make you think that somehow you're missing something.
The other SEO-related new features are the addition of <noindex>, <nofollow>, and <noarchive> options. Some of these were available in earlier versions in different places—now you just have more places you can use them. These options allow you to prevent search engines from indexing or caching certain pages or from including certain links when they're determining how to rank pages in their results. This is a complex topic, with lots of people having different opinions about how to do this. I spend virtually no time thinking about it for my own sites so can't offer any great thoughts on the matter. Google "link juice" to learn more about the topic (and prepare to be thoroughly confused after reading all the contradictory advice...).
So that's my take on the new SEO options in Thesis 1.7. What do you think? Am I totally missing the mark here? Will these new options be a big help to you? Add your comments below.
In my next post, I will discuss the new Options Manager as well as the interface changes to the various options panels. In the meantime, if you have any specific questions about Thesis, whether or not they're related to the new version, please send them to me at Thesis@TechForLuddites.com.
Sign up for the Thesis newsletter to get more great tips, delivered right to your Inbox!
Posted in My Two Cents, Search, Thesis
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey, thanks for a great article. I searched just after 1.7 was released and couldn’t find an answer, figured it might be too early, and then went back to my question again this morning. In 1.6 there was a option to “noindex” category and archive pages and everyone recommended doing this to avoid duplicate content being presented to search engines. I see that in 1.7 the ‘blanket’ noindex has been removed and now each category and tag page is handled individually in the page options section. I still have all of mine set to noindex as before. What I am asking is if I remove the no index from a category and provide title and meta description tags is it no longer duplicate content?
I was reviewing the “tag page options” in 1.7, I notice the “Add noindex to this page” & “Add nofollow to this page” are both checked. Is this correct? Am I not limiting search engines from finding my pages?
{ 1 trackback }