The SEO Framework

Wordpress Plugin
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The only feature-complete SEO plugin that follows the white-hat guidelines and rules imposed by WordPress and search engines.

Start using proven methods to optimize your website for SEO. Simple, dedicated, extensible, unrestricted, ad-free, and no strings attached.

To top it off, this is the fastest full-featured SEO plugin, and it blends right into your WordPress website, without leaving you in the dark.

It's easy to get started. Activate this plugin, and your site's already protected against prominent SEO attacks. The SEO Framework will also prefill all critical meta tags for you. A real time-saver. Ingenious.

Migrate | Setup | Improve | Extensions | API | Support | Privacy

We poured over 16,000 hours into this plugin. Here are the results:

  • It is brilliant. The SEO Framework is an expert system for SEO. It is the only solution that can intelligently generate critical SEO meta tags in any language by reading your WordPress environment. This automation saves you a considerable amount of time that could be used to write more content or focus on other tasks. It also removes the need for advanced SEO knowledge.

  • It comes preconfigured. With The SEO Framework, we provide an excellent starting point for your website by rationally optimizing all your pages. Naturally, you can also tweak it however you like. If you're not an SEO expert, learn what you may wish to optimize in our Setup guide.

  • It helps you optimize your metadata. We made the only SEO plugin that follows Google's webmaster guidelines to the letter. It took years of research and tweaking to translate this well inside your WordPress interface. Finally, you can freely optimize your pages without having to worry about making critical mistakes.

  • It creates a beautiful overview. On your post overview pages, you'll find color-coded guidelines. They suggest you how to improve your pages as you hover over them with your mouse. For example, when your titles are unbranded or when WordPress blocks indexing. Instinctively, touch-and keyboard navigation is also supported.

  • It includes exceptional support. We don't outsource our support. We're here for you. Feel free to drop by our support forums at any time to ask a question. More than 1400 inquiries have been answered personally, typically within 48 hours in the past five years.

  • It leaves no room for errors. We focus on the quality of features you need over the quantity on features you don't. This trait makes this plugin unique, faster, more accurate, nearly bug-free, and more sustainable. The added benefit is that your site is unlikely to get penalized by search engines. We won't steer you into writing unnatural content or allow you to trick search engines.

  • It remains genuine and pure. We built The SEO Framework for small to large corporations and enterprises. The interface is entirely accessible and seamlessly integrates within your dashboard. Therefore, interacting with this plugin feels natural. It might feel dull, but your WordPress dashboard shouldn't be a billboard for our branding. We won't ever change this.

  • It improves search presence. The SEO Framework ranks your website distinctively by enabling breadcrumbs for Google Search, and by automatically generating titles and descriptions according to Google's guidelines. It also notifies Google, Bing, and all connected search networks automatically of your website's changes with its built-in sitemap.

  • It makes social sharing easy. The SEO Framework automatically supports and allows you to further tailor the Open Graph, Facebook, and Twitter Cards protocols. It helps your posts stand out when they're shared on various social networks, including Pinterest, Discord, and Whatsapp.

  • It feels more than accessible. We handpicked our color scheme so that people with any medically recognized color-vision deficiency can distinguish the guidelines set by search engines. We also implemented full keyboard-navigation and screen-reader support.

  • It protects you from mistakes. The SEO Framework steers you from making significant and common SEO mistakes. It leaves little room for you to mess up because the plugin already does everything SEO for you. For example, it automatically prevents duplicated content mistakes by enforcing strict canonical rules.

  • It follows best-practices and beyond. The biggest problems with WordPress plugins are security and compatibility. As part-time security researchers, we focus on making this plugin impenetrable. The SEO Framework also uses WordPress's API whenever possible, making this plugin integrate neatly with every other plugin written with that in mind.

  • It has developers at heart. We encourage other developers to enhance and add functionality to this plugin. We've done so ourselves, already, with our extensions. Check out our API, and feel free to contribute!

  • It respects your privacy. The SEO Framework sends us no information and does not create cookies. Learn more from our strictly adhered-to privacy policy.

Getting started

  • Used another plugin? Easily migrate your SEO data.
  • Need a helping hand getting started? Read our quick setup guide.
  • Want to improve your pages? Learn how to optimize your metadata.

Do more with extensions

For additional functionality, check out our free companion plugin Extension Manager. It provides numerous free and paid extensions, such as:

  • Focus guides you through the process of writing targeted content that ranks with focus keywords and synonyms.
  • Articles enhances your published posts by automatically adding important Structured Data.
  • Honeypot catches comment spammers through four lightweight yet powerful ways.
  • Cord helps you connect your website to Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
  • Local lets you set up important local business information for search engines to consume.
  • AMP binds The SEO Framework to the AMP plugin for AMP supported articles and pages.
  • Monitor keeps track of your website's SEO optimizations and statistics.
  • Incognito hides all development-comments from The SEO Framework.
  • Origin redirects attachment-page visitors back to the parent post.
  • Title Fix makes sure your title output is as configured. Even if your theme is doing it wrong.

Visit our extensions overview page for more information.

Unbranded, free and for the professionals

The SEO Framework is a uniquely white label plugin that blends seamlessly into your WordPress dashboard. This means that we don't even put the name "The SEO Framework" anywhere within your WordPress interface. No ads, no nags. Nobody has to know about the tools you've used to create your website. Note that we output standardized development-comments distinguishing the plugin output in source code. You can remove these with our free Incognito extension.

Behind the screens

The SEO Framework works on many things without notifying you, because the best software should save you precious time. Here are a few things it does behind the screens.

  • It prevents canonical errors for categories, pages, subdomains, and WordPress Multisite domain mapping.
  • It stops SEO attacks that are caused by pagination exploits in WordPress by telling the search engine to look at the existing last page instead.
  • It discourages 404 pages and empty categories from being indexed, even when they don't send a 404 response.
  • It automatically notifies Google and the Bing network on website updates when sitemaps are enabled.
  • It discourages search engines from indexing feeds and the sitemap. This doesn't mean they won't use them, they only won't show them in their search results.
  • It directs search engines from the comment pages back to the post storing those comments.

Compatibility

The SEO Framework supports:

  • PHP 5.6 and higher.
  • WordPress 4.9 and higher.
  • Internationalization through WordPress.org.
  • UTF-8 character recognition and rendering, including Emoji and CJK.
  • Right to Left (RTL) languages, through its interface and generation.
  • Extended color-vision deficiency accessibility.
  • Better screen-reader accessibility via ARIA labels and title attributes.
  • Full keyboard navigation.
  • WordPress Multisite setups, this plugin is in fact built upon one.
  • Detection and output of robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.
  • Output of structured data via Schema.org JSON-LD scripts.
  • Altering oEmbed for improved sharing on Discord.
  • Detection of various other SEO tools to help you switch graciously.
  • Translation plugins like WPML, Polylang, WPGlobus, and MultilingualPress.
  • E-commerce plugins, like WooCommerce and EDD.

Copyright legislation notice

In a few words: The SEO Framework allows search engines to do what they've been doing for the past 20 years.

When you activate The SEO Framework on any site, you automatically grant rights to content aggregators, among which are Google, Bing, and Yandex, to obtain and use information from the site, including written work, images, audio, and video. You can control these rights via the robots-meta settings brought by this plugin. Your rights and the effectiveness of these settings are subject to the region and language of your website, and the physical or virtual origin of the platform and their potential users through which your website's information is obtained and shared. It is up to the aggregator to honor your rights and the requests brought via The SEO Framework.

If you wish to learn more, please refer to the website of the EU commission on copyright. These rulings may propagate its effects through regions outside the EU.


Releases (23 )

Version Release Date Change Log
4.0.7 2020-04-28

This follow-up update to 4.0.6 addresses an issue where the WooCommerce shop page was seen as an actual archive mistakenly. For that page, this issue caused your post-edit input, among other SEO data, to no longer be honored.
4.0.6 2020-04-28

In this update, we addressed a few issues our amazing users helped investigate. With that, we implemented better bbPress title support, and fixed a bug regarding WooCommerce and term-ID collisions.

We also increased the entropy for generating object caching keys, addressed some translation and RTL errors, and added a few new filters.
4.0.5 2020-03-04

In WordPress, we found various query endpoints that can be malformed to create broken pages. Backlinks to these pages can harm your site's ranking. In this update, we added advanced query protection, which you can enable via the robots meta settings.

The "Connected Social Pages" input fields will now disappear when you empty them. They have never proven to work, and Google has deprecated them. We also removed the transient caching for JSON-LD scripts, as it wasn't helping anyone.

On the other hand, we added a new feed indexing option, Discord sharing options (oEmbed, theme color), and the aforementioned advanced query protection option. Support for EDD and Polylang has been expanded, and we reintroduced the hyphen option for titles (which is the new default).

In this update, we bring a few other quality-of-life changes, as well. We added a dozen new filters, touched up the interface, streamlined the query handler, and fixed known corner-case issues and bugs.
4.0.4 2019-11-21

WordPress 5.3 has a bug where the timezone set in PHP is taken into account when creating permalinks. Since this bug can cause canonical URLs with dates to point to a nonexistent page, we're sending out this patch where TSF sets the timezone to flat UTC for its front-end generation.

The proper fix in WordPress 5.3.1 is due in about three weeks from now, after which we'll consider reverting these changes.
4.0.3 2019-11-12

Google Search has a new bug in their parser, which causes pages to be deindexed unintentionally when a specific combination of robots-settings are used. To work around this bug, we changed how the recently introduced copyright directive settings work.

For more information, see our KB entry on why the Maximum Image Preview Size setting may now be ignored.

We also fixed three bugs and added minor improvements.
4.0.2 2019-10-15

France recently amended its copyright laws. In short, in France, it's now forbidden for content aggregators to display excerpts and previews of your content when no consent is given.

To accommodate those laws, Google will soon look for new directives, and we added new site-wide options to output those. These new options are disabled (unspecified) by default when you update The SEO Framework, but they are enabled (some access) by default when you install The SEO Framework on a new site. Please see this issue for our take on this.

In this update, we also fixed a few bugs and added various improvements.
3.2.4 2019-05-08

In this minor update, we bring you the most advanced description generation yet. The generator is now context-sensitive, so you can expect the descriptions to be even more natural; a real time-saver!

Oh, we also fixed some bugs, and we've implemented some improvements in preparation for version 3.3.0.
3.2.3 2019-02-20

This minor update fixes some old, leftover bugs. We've also removed the sitemap pinging options for Yandex, as they no longer allow this.
3.2.2 2019-01-24

This minor update brings major bug fixes. Most notoriously, the home page settings now predict the metadata perfectly in the admin screens. Bloggers will love this update, too, because Facebook and Twitter metadata for the home blog page is now always correct.

For developers, please note that the upcoming major release (3.3.0) will introduce new taxonomical settings. Because the image-rendering integration isn't suited for this, it'll be overhauled. For more information, see this issue.

Also, for developers, note that some API changes better suited for a major release were also brought into this minor release; these were required to fix some bugs.
3.1.4 2018-10-09

This update brings improved compatibility with WooCommerce, adds a few filters, and fixes various logic issues.
3.0.6 2018-09-12
  • Lionize =

Release date

  • May 6th, 2018

Summarized:

  • TSF now integrates completely with attachment pages.
  • Non-personalized Facebook profile links can now be set via the Social SEO settings and user's Authorial Info settings.
  • Seven bugs have been fixed, mainly involving descriptions and the sitemap.
  • The plugin now suggests, once, that you can use Focus keywords via the Extension Manager.

For everyone, about the suggestion:

  • We believe not everyone is up-to-date yet with the current progression of the extensions. Some of which can help you out greatly with SEO.
  • So, from this update, all sites will get a one-time-only auto-dismissing suggestion for TSFEM.
  • This suggestion has many conditions attached before being shown. So, it's likely you won't ever see it.
  • We understand that not everyone welcomes this introduction. However, this suggestion is to help this plugin and your site grow, from which we all will benefit.

For developers, about descriptions:

  • If you're using description-related filters or functions from TSF on your sites, check out the detailed "for developers" log.
  • Many functions have been silently deprecated, and you should now use simple caller functions.
  • No action is needed from your side until the next major release (ETA July 2018).

For developers, about titles ETA July 2018:

  • In the next major release, we're going to change how we handle titles.
  • This change won't affect users directly. But it will allow us to manipulate the titles better.
  • For more information, view and subscribe to issue 202.

View the detailed log.
3.0.5 2018-04-11
  • Rectified =

Release date:

  • February 27th, 2017

Summarized:

  • An issue with outdated browsers not parsing TSF's admin JavaScript has been resolved.

View the detailed log.
3.0.4 2018-02-26
  • Illustrious =

Release date:

  • February 25th, 2017

Did you know?

  • We're working on an extension for keyword and subject analysis, named Focus.
  • In its current state, it's already on par with other solutions, but we are going to take it even further.
  • More details will follow in a blog post, which we'll link to on our Twitter page when the features are ready.

Summarized:

  • This is a maintenance release with over 10 bugs fixed. Most notoriously were pixel guideline calculation errors and home page title errors.
  • Open Graph and Twitter custom title and description options have been added to every post, page, and CPT.
  • The description character count and pixel length guidelines have been updated.
  • All publicly queryable CPT posts and pages now support SEO settings and are included in the sitemap. No more messing with filters is needed.

About the new description guidelines:

  • Google increased their SERP's description length a few months ago, so we've updated the upper-limit guidelines.
  • We recommend enforcing these new guidelines for new pages, cornerstone pages, and the home page.
  • Although the description lengths have been updated, the transient cache isn't invalidated.
  • Over time the cache will refresh itself, this is done automatically by WordPress, or via your caching plugin's transients handler (if applicable).

About the social meta input:

  • There are new Open Graph and Twitter inputs in the SEO Settings.
  • The Twitter settings, when left empty, will use the Open Graph output.
  • The Open Graph settings, when left empty, will use the SEO meta output.
  • As always, auto-generated Open Graph and Twitter descriptions won't use prefixes.

Found unwanted links in the sitemap?

  • If you find posts in the sitemap that shouldn't be there, please refer to our renewed FAQ.
  • The FAQ entry title is "The sitemap contains unwanted links".

View the detailed log.
3.0.3 2018-02-26
  • Diligence =

Release date:

  • December 6th, 2017

Summarized:

  • This update implements a workaround for an issue with bbPress, and various UI bugs have been fixed as well.

View the detailed log.
3.0.2 2017-11-23
  • Esteem =

Release date:

  • November 23rd, 2017

Fixed:

  • A fatal error no longer occurs on the wpForo Forum plugin pages.
2.9.4 2017-09-13
  • Terminal Queries =

Release date:

  • August 30th, 2017

Summarized:

  • New performance options have been added. They allow you to optimize Search and Archive query alterations.
  • Schema.org JSON-LD data is now cleaner when you run PHP 5.4 or later.
  • Custom input image URLs can now dynamically switch between HTTP and HTTPS and the dimensions are always set, regardless of input.
  • Multisite networks no longer initiate new database connections on every page for plugin compatibility checks.

Did you know?

  • Local SEO has been added to the Extension Manager.
  • It increases location-aware search presence in Google Search, Google Maps, and even Google Images.

Detailed log:

  • I had not overlooked them, and they shall be answered.
2.9.3 2017-07-03

A highly recommended update that fixes "Home Page as Blog" query issues.
2.9.2 2017-05-08
  • Diminutive Consolidation =

Release date:

  • May 8th, 2017

Summarized:

  • Now, Polylang is officially supported by The SEO Framework.
  • The sitemap now supports plain permalinks. That means it now literally works for every website.
  • The robots.txt file has been enhanced, so it now informs you when the output location is incorrect.
  • Moreover, various bugs have been fixed, mainly concerning third party plugins.

We're looking for translation editors:

  • First, thank you so much to all the translation contributors.
  • Now, if you want to see The SEO Framework in your language, head over to this page and feel free to contribute.
  • If you wish to easily maintain and keep a close eye on all the contributions for your language, ask us to ask WordPress Polyglots to add you as a contributor.
  • Ultimately, it's up to the WordPress Polyglots team to fulfill your request. It generally depends on how well you've submitted translations for you to be accepted.

A few notes about translations:

  • If you use a machine to translate for you, note that they can generate out-of-context strings. So keep an eye out for those!
  • If you notice that strings are very hard to translate, e.g. because of grammatical gender, let us know!
  • Please don't translate "The SEO Framework", it's a registered brand-name.
  • Be sure not to add spaces if you see backticks, asterisks, or brackets. They're used for Markdown language construction.
  • In TSF, you generally can't use UTF character codes like ♡, as they're automatically removed or rendered unreadable for added security. Add them as displayed instead: ****.

Detailed log:

If you are a friend, speak the password, and the doors will open, and you can enter.
2.9.1 2017-03-27
  • Sovereign Comprehension =

Release date:

  • 27th March 2017

Summarized:

  • This release patches a few bugs that were brought with the 2.9.0 release related to debugging and cache clearing.
  • And if you like to use quick edit a lot, the SEO Bar will now also re-render on save.

Detailed log:

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
2.9.0 2017-03-25
  • Equitable Erudition =

Courage is found in unlikely places - J.R.R. Tolkien

Release date:

  • 25th March 2017

Summarized:

  • This update focuses on fixing bugs and expanding the API for developers.
  • To expand the API for per page (in-post) SEO settings, tabs had to be added in the SEO settings metabox.
  • The JavaScript code has also been overhauled to improve performance and allow third party implementation.
  • Moreover, the home page settings now allow you to upload a social image.
  • Structured data markup has also been improved, like the inclusion of an alternative Sitename and fixes for Breadcrumb images.
  • The sitemap can now include the blog page. The lastmod value of which listens to multiple pages to automatically determines what's best.
  • Unfortunately, Twitter has removed support for photo cards. This update makes sure that the regarding settings correctly convert to the current format.

Only one week left for the earliest of early-bird discounts:

  • With The SEO Framework - Extension Manager's release, a celebratory discount has been introduced.
  • If you wish to benefit from this lifetime discount, visit the shop for more information.
  • More awesome extensions are coming soon!

Survey:

  • After updating, please fill in our Update Survey: tell us what you like or can be done better.

For everyone: Tabbed In-post SEO layout

  • This release brings tabbed layout to the in-post SEO settings.
  • With this change I've also altered the overall looks, with the help from Daniel.
  • This layout allows extensions from the Extension Manager to be implemented much easier.
  • This layout is self-responsive! This means it's not dependent on the browser-size, but on how much content will fit.
  • This layout therefore allows the SEO settings to be placed in the right sidebar! Take a look at the new screenshots.

For everyone: Browser support

  • This release brings CSS Flexbox to the new in-post SEO settings metabox.
  • The flexbox module is still experimental, in a way that not all browsers correctly support this to the fullest extend.
  • However, support for as many browsers feasible has been implemented. Check out the list. Enjoy!
  • The gist is that Chrome, Firefox, IE10 and Safari 6 or later are supported.

SEO Tip of the Update - Trust in layout

  • Is your website glitchy and has placeholder images, unmatched colors or weirdly contrasting borders all over the place?
  • Consider going for a more modern and clean layout. Strip out what isn't necessary. A clean layout implies professionalism and increases visitors' trust.
  • Even if you're just starting out with your website, remove all that could be but really isn't. Because if you leave in placeholders for the future, it implies amateurism.
  • People want their truth to be confirmed or their problems to be solved. If you can't confirm or solve the layout of your website, then they won't trust you to do so for their issues.
  • Simply put: It doesn't have to be perfect, it just must be done.

Detailed log:

It is some miles, but it will shorten your journey tomorrow.
2.8.2 2017-01-28

In the 2.8.0 update WordPress 4.3 and PHP 5.2 support have been dropped for better code quality.
2.7.3 2017-01-22
  • Incandescently Binate =

Release date:

  • January 5th 2017

Did you know?

  • The SEO Framework - Extension Manager has been published on WordPress.org.
  • More extensions are coming soon! Stay tuned :)

Summarized:

  • This update makes sure no conflicts arise anymore with WP Engine's staging services when WordPress is at a major version release.

Sorry, no SEO tip of the Update

Detailed log:

Remember, a changelog's details flows from our website.
2.6.6 2016-06-15
  • Semantic Structures =

Release date:

  • June 14th 2016

Summarized

  • Page builders are great for if you want to style your website, and when you want to do it fast.
  • So from this update the Divi Builder, Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, and the Page Builder by SiteOrigin are now fully supported.
  • Various bugs have also been fixed, to improve your experience. One particular bugfix is related to Polylang; this bugfix should improve performance and reduce other bugs from happening as well.
  • The Automated and Manual description output has been improved in several ways as well.
  • For developers, a class has been removed. All functions within have been moved to more suitable classes. This change will reduce server resource usage and increase overall performance.

SEO Tip of the Update - Know your Keywords:

  • To know how your website is found, sign up for Google Search Console. Over a couple of days (or weeks), elegant data has been accumulated about your website.
  • When you go to the Search Analytics within the Search Console, you'll see a list of queries people have used to find your website.
  • The queries can be used as keywords, they are excellent starting points for new post titles and subjects. Go ahead, use them!

For developers - About the class removal:

  • Because the plugin makes use of a "Facade pattern", all functions within the plugin are available at all times.
  • In trade for increased resource usage this does make the plugin very compatible, faster, and easier to work with.
  • This plugin serves one single responsibility: Outputting SEO data, and determining the reason why. Therefore, although it looks like a "God object", it's not.
  • Please keep in mind that all functions from any class are available through the "Facade object". Because of this, the class removal shouldn't cause issues for developers.
  • You can call this "Facade object" through a single cached function (rather than a global variable), this cached function is the_seo_framework().
  • If you wish to extend this plugin, feel free to ask me for any details or suggestions at the Support forums.

Detailed Log:

There's something to be said about all these details.