SimpleSEO Static Plugin Has A Dynamic Roadmap Ahead!

The SEO plugin did extremely well in the limited, but very thorough trials with both English and non-english sites, and grew around ten new configuration options in the process.

It's well-suited for light-to-medium production use. I want to talk about what it would need in order to run in reasonable time with limited configuration if someone had tens of thousands of pages in multiple languages. Here's what I think the plugin needs for the next major release:

Object-Style Configuration

It has become clear that supporting words, characters, sentences, and the rest of the segmentation API is popular, but the exclusive nature of one-for-all is frustrating.

There's also the issue of n'th to the n'th options ending up in this thing and I'm not really trying to emulate wget here.

So, we're going to move to a custom declarative syntax where we specify a number followed by the character 'c', 'w', 's' (character, word, sentence, etc) for each option supported by the International segmentation API.

This would allow measuring titles in characters but overall content length being measured in words, or even 'g' for grapheme.

Hashing Of Content Document Object

Notice that, on every save, the plugin processes all of the targets again, even those that didn't change. If you have a blog with 50 posts that's not a big deal, but it could start to burn up your free CI build minutes for something larger in several languages.

A small but very pleasant change in Lume 3 is always being able to count on the document object being available in the page object. It doesn't guarantee anything about what might be in it, but it does guarantee each page has one. We can use this to take a fast fingerprint to see if a page changed since last time, and possibly skip lots of segmentation at the cost of SHA1. That may or may not be an appealing proposition, depending on your circumstances. What matters is you have the option.

Querying Of Index Status / Auto Update Crawlers

The plugin needs to be able to do these two things:

1. Query Google Console API and retrieve the current URL's status (indexed or not, why not, last visited, etc)

2. Ping the Bing Webmaster Tools to notify crawlers of content updates, so re-crawls can happen fluidly and quickly.

This should not be hard to do once we have some method of caching / hashing.

That's more than enough to keep me busy for the next two or more releases, so we'll leave off here for now. Now you can better decide if it's something you want to use at this stage or not. I hope this roadmap was helpful in that decision!