Platinum SEO Pack was created in 2008 when the original maintainer of All-in-One SEO Pack lost interest in it and stopped development. While another maintainer soon appeared for All-in-One SEO and it remains the heavyweight champion of WordPress SEO tools, Platinum SEO has some additional capabilities that All-in-One lacks. I use it on my blogs and think it’s an excellent tool for doing on-site search engine optimization. Let’s do a quick rundown of the feature sets…
Installing Platinum SEO plugin (or All-in-One plugin) is simple. Both install like any other plugin you’ve used; either unzip the contents and upload the directory into your blog’s wp-content/plugins/ directory with an FTP client, or log into your blog admin, go to your Plugins management and upload the zip file directly via the “Add New => Upload” option. Once the plugin is installed, go to your main “Installed” plugins table and click the “Activate” link, and you’re done! You’ll now see a new entry in your administration’s left menu, “Platinum SEO”. The configuration pages for Platinum and All-in-One are similar, but Platinum adds a lot of capabilities:
- Platinum SEO can automatically do 301 redirects for permalink changes
- Independently set noindex for author-based archives, as well as category, date and tag-based
- Set noindex for paginated comment displays (GREAT feature!)
- Set noindex on RSS and RSS comments feeds
- Set noindex for sub-pages
- Add noodp (Open Directory Project) and noydir (Yahoo! Directories) tags
- Add nofollow to category and/or date-based archive listings on pages and/or posts
- Add nofollow to tag page links
- Add nofollow to external links on front page
- Add nofollow to login and registration links
To be fair, there are also a few things that All-in-One offers that Platinum doesn’t:
- Dynamically generated keywords for Posts page
- Specify a list of pages to exclude from optimization
- Capitalization of Category titles
Clearly, on a feature-for-feature basis, Platinum SEO outranks All-in-One. For my money, the ability to force noindex on paginated comments for all but the first page is worth going with Platinum SEO all by itself. Add to that the ability to add control on RSS feeds and author-based archives as well as tag, category and date-based, and it’s a pretty clear win. This puts me in the minority at this time, as All-in-One is way in the lead based on downloads from WordPress.org, but I strongly suggest you give Platinum a try. It even offers a tool to auto-import all your AIO settings once you’ve activated it.
Also, one important warning, which applies to both Platinum SEO and All-in-One. Both of these plugins implement a lot of their functionality by adding “actions” to the WordPress get_header() functionality. It is important that your theme does the standard thing when generating its HTML headers and calls the get_header() function. Some themes do not do this, but instead just have a header.php file and then do a simple PHP include of it in their index.php, single.php, or category.php templates. If your theme does this, some of the modifications (like title rewrite) that your plugin is set up to do will not make it to your pages. If you don’t know how to do this, hang around; I will be posting more articles on these basics in the future. Or you can just go to the URL in my signature below for more information.
