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Hello, I’m MaAnna with BlogAid and in this quick video I’ll show you a new feature
that came turned on by default in a recent update to the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.
It’s a little thing but it could have a big impact on your SEO, including getting
you found in search and whether or not your post gets the click. So let’s dive in and
show you what it is. We’re on the Post Editor where we can create
a new blog post. I’m going to input a title so you can see
the change that Yoast put in his plugin. Now, of course this is a bit nonsensical,
but it will help me show you the change. When you type a search into Google, one of
the first things it does is drop what are called stop words. These are words like a,
the, of, and so on. To gain SEO brownie points with Google, some
bloggers have also been removing stop words from their permalinks too.
That has become popular to the point that a few developers have created plugins to automatically
do it for you. Well, now Yoast has incorporated it into his plugin. Let’s take a look at
how it works. You can see the words I input into the title
of post. And the permalink is naturally derived from those same words by default. It’s something
that WordPress does for you based on the permalink structure you chose in Settings.
When I scroll down, I can even see that the Snippet preview from the plugin shows all
of the words in the title, but it’s got this goofy preview on the permalink now. It
used to display the permalink WordPress had created for me.
Now, when I publish this page, look what happens to the permalink.
All of the stop words were automatically removed. All what’s left of the title is words, removed,
post, title. If we scroll down and have a look at the snippet,
we see the abbreviated permalink. Here’s the problem with this plugin feature
and all other plugins that drop stop words. You can’t have two instances of the same
thing in a database. So, if you create two pages or posts with the same title, one of
them will automatically have the number 2 at the end. That also happens if you delete
a page or post and then create another with the same title. Deleting takes it out of the
list, but puts it in the trash. You have to empty the trash to get it out of your database.
So, I’m going to create another post. And I’m going to use the same title, but
this time I’m going to change the order of the first two words and one other a little
further down. I’m going to let it create the permalink.
Now, I’m going to hit Publish. And look what happened. Even though I changed
the order of the words, left one out, and changed another, they were all stop words
and they all got dropped. So, that created a second slug, which is what the end of the
permalink is called, and it is exactly the same as the first post in this video, so it
had to put a 2 after it. Now, let’s jump over to our list of posts
and see if we notice this problem there. Nope. No problem here. The titles are shown
with all of the words. Okay, let’s have another look at the last
post we created to see another caveat. I’m scrolling down to the snippet preview
provided by the WordPress SEO plugin. Look at that permalink. Would you click that
if you saw it in a list of Search Engine Results? Remember, when your post comes up in search,
it’s sitting on a page right next to other results from other sites. The title and meta
description will hopefully pull traffic into your site. But, to me, that permalink looks
spammy. Now, I’m saying that knowing that Joost
de Valk is the dude when it comes to SEO. And, some pretty big content marketing folks
have been using this strategy for a couple of years. Basically, their permalink looks
exactly like the query Google is using to search.
Another thing to consider is that having a plugin do this for you decreases the chances
that you will make a typo in your permalink when you manually remove the stop words. I
don’t know about you, but I’m prone to the habit of putting a space between words.
That will really goof up a permalink. So, you’ll need to decide for yourself whether
you want to keep this feature turned on. Let me show you where the checkbox is.
Go to SEO > Permalinks. It’s this third checkbox to Remove stop
words from slugs. It was checked on the minute it was added to the plugin a couple of updates
ago. So, if you want to turn it off, uncheck the
box. And then scroll down to the bottom of the
page and click the Save Settings button. Also, if you have another plugin that is specifically
designed to remove stop words from your permalinks, you’ll want to turn this setting off. You
don’t want two plugins fighting to do the same thing.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this video on removing stop words from permalinks via the WordPress
SEO plugin. Be sure to visit BlogAid.net and click the Video Tutorials link at the top
to see the full SEO and AuthorRank video course library where I take you through every setting
in the WordPress SEO plugin, plus on-page SEO tips, and also help you make all 14 authorship
connections.