SC SEO self-updates

Lean, site-agnostic technical SEO — titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph/Twitter cards, canonical URLs, robots controls, schema.org JSON-LD, and a redirect manager. No content-analysis bloat.

Description

SC SEO is built to be dropped into any WordPress site as-is — no build step, no Composer install. It deliberately covers only the technical side of SEO (the part search engines and social platforms actually read from markup) and leaves out the content-analysis/readability scoring that plugins like Yoast or Rank Math build their UI around.

Every public post type gets an "SC SEO" box above the content editor: an SEO title and meta description (with a live SERP-style preview and a character counter, not a quality score), a canonical URL override, noindex/nofollow checkboxes, social title/description/image overrides, and a structured-data type choice. Any field left blank falls back sensibly — title/description to a sitewide template, social image to the featured image, then a sitewide default.

One JSON-LD "@graph" block is printed on every page: an Organization (or LocalBusiness/ProfessionalService/Store/ Restaurant — SC SEO → Settings → Business & Schema) node plus a WebSite node — the part that actually helps a Knowledge Panel or an AI answer engine identify who the site belongs to — and, on singular content, a BreadcrumbList plus a page-level Article/WebPage/FAQPage node. The whole graph is filterable via scseo_schema_graph, so another plugin (SC Events Manager, SC Room Bookings, or this site's own theme) can add its own nodes without SC SEO needing to know it exists.

No custom XML sitemap — WordPress core has served one at /wp-sitemap.xml since 5.5. SC SEO only makes sure a post marked noindex here is also excluded from that.

Redirects

SC SEO → Redirects manages 301/302/410/451 redirects, either one at a time or via a CSV bulk import (source, destination,type — type optional, defaults to 301) — built for migrating a retired site's URLs in one go without losing their link equity. Each redirect is a scseo_redirect post under the hood (source path as the title, target/ type/hit-count as postmeta), but the front-end match against every incoming request is served from a single cached lookup array (rebuilt whenever a redirect changes), not a live database query per request.

Changelog

0.2.3

• Sites running this plugin now get the normal "Update available" notice in wp-admin, served from this plugin's GitHub Releases.

0.2.2

• Added three opt-in settings (all off by default, so existing sites behave as before): noindex thin archives (single-post tag archives, the sole author's archive, date archives), redirect attachment pages to their parent, and disable unused RSS/Atom feeds.
• The posts page (blog index) is now treated as a real page: it gets its own title, canonical URL, meta description and Open Graph tags, where before it had no canonical or description.

0.2.1

• Fixed the XML sitemap noindex filter excluding posts with a stray, falsy _scseo_noindex postmeta row (e.g. left over from an import) — those were silently dropped from the sitemap even though nothing on the page itself said noindex. The filter now correctly keeps any post where the meta doesn't exist or isn't truthy.

0.2.0

• Added an optional GA4 Measurement ID field (SC SEO → Settings → General) — prints the gtag.js snippet only when set, and is skipped automatically whenever the sitewide "discourage search engines" noindex switch is on, so staging/pre-launch traffic never reaches a real property.
• Post types edited in the block editor (use_block_editor_for_post_type()) now get a native Gutenberg PluginDocumentSettingPanel — the same fields as the classic "SC SEO" box, reading/writing the same postmeta (now registered as REST-visible via register_post_meta()) — instead of the classic box, which only ever showed for classic-editor post types to begin with. No build step: hand-written against the wp-* globals the block editor already loads, matching every other SC plugin's own JS.

0.1.0

• Initial release.