Search Engine Verify WordPress Plugin
I've just released another plugin. This one enables you to easily add those meta tags you get from Google, Bing and Yahoo that verifies you are the authorised owner of a website.
The three meta tags the plugin adds to your home page are;
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="******" />
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="******" />
<meta name="y_key" content="******" />
Naturally you get to specify the content values. You get those from the webmaster area of each search engine; Read more on Search Engine Verify WordPress Plugin →
Robots.txt WordPress Plugin
This is another one of those handy plugins designed for people like myself, who just want to be able to set something up and then not worry about it again.
What the plugin does
You probably know that when a search engine spider visits your site, one of the first things it does is look for a file called robots.txt which tells it which files and folders it can go and look at. By default, WordPress lets every robot go everywhere. That might be ok for some people, but I prefer to exercise a bit more control over things.
For example, if the robot identifies itself as a bad bot – yes, some of them do – then I don't want it to go anywhere. All it's probably going to do is trawl for email addresses to add to a spam list somewhere. And I don't really want any robots poking their noses into such places as the WordPress admin folder. Control freak? Me? Don't know what you mean…
The solution is to add the names of bad bots to your robots.txt file and disallow them from going anywhere, and add the names of common search engine spiders and specify which locations or files they are allowed to visit. Read more of Robots.txt WordPress Plugin →
Hi there. My name is Peter Coughlin. I am a freelance web developer living in the UK, and at the moment I am specialising in WordPress customisation.