After reading the recent article, "5 common mistakes with rel=canonical" on Google's Webmaster Central Blog, it inspired me to finish some of the improvements I had begun making to the Semiologic SEO a few months back.   In version 2.1,  I had added improved rel=canonical support.   With this version 2.3 release, I added the missing rel="next" and rel="prev" link tags for multi-page blog posts and collections, such as the blog page and archive lists, that span multiple pages.

Along with the changes in 2.3:

• Added prev and next adjacent canonical links for multi-page and series of pages, such as blog pages
• Fixed duplicate title for multi-page blog posts
• Fixed setting of canonical link for the blog page

the following changes were made in 2.2:

• Fix meta description tag not being set for home page
• Clarified SEO->Settings field usage as being for the home page.

Version 2.3 has been pushed to the Semiologic update server.  You should see an upgrade notification when you log into your site's backend.

As mentioned in previous posts on this blog, efforts have been underway to bring the Semiologic Theme and Plugins up-to-date with WordPress 3.5.   Over the past several weeks I have been releasing the software versions available to Semiologic Pro members.    I am pleased to announce that I have released all the plugins excerpt for 2 to work with the latest WordPress 3.5.1 release.   The remaining 2 plugins, Mediacaster and Search Reloaded, require some more in depth development work.

The plan will be to finish off the Mediacaster and Search Reloaded plugins and then publish a complete Semiologic Pro download package.    After reaching that milestone, I can then focus on adding new functionality and continuing to advance the Semiologic products.

Thanks again for all the support over the past months.

Mike

This is probably one of the more exciting updates so far.  This Semiologic SEO release adds support for Google Authorship. For those that have a Google+ account, your photo can now show up along side Google search results. Details on setting this up are at the end of this post.

Enhanced and fixed in this release are:

• Google+ authorship including new Profile contact fields for Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Fixed duplicate titles on archive, category, author, tags page where there are 2 or more pages
• Additional rel=canonical entries for home and archive, category, author, tags pages
• Fix: Sem-cache now flushed on SEO options change
• Fix: Silence PHP warning for ob_start call

To setup Google Authorship:

1. Go to Users->Your Profile and enter your Google+ user profile link under Google+.
2. Save Profile.
3. Go to Settings->SEO
4. You need to select which author to use for the Google+ Authorship for the websites homepage.
5. Under Google Plus Publisher, enter the url of the business' Google+ page. (if applicable)
6. Save.
7. That's it. The plugin will add meta link data into your site's header section for the homepage and then posts & pages.

On the Google+ side of things….

• On the Google+ Business About page, have a link back to the website (ie http://semiologic.com)
• On the Google+ Profile page, under other profiles, you link to the website's author page (http://www.semiologic.com/author/mike/)
• On the Google+ Profile page, under contributor, you link to your website (ie http://semiologic.com)

Semiologic SEO is a premium plugin that is part of the Semiologic Pro package.