Andrei Zhitkov

<p>Defining your default canonical arbitrary is most useful for those unfortunate souls who have their site URLs in punycode. This plugin allows setting a default custom URL to be used as canonical. It is designed to work with Yoast SEO only. The individual settings are still available and can be edited as before. Since it is dependent on presence of Yoast SEO, this plugin will not activate without it.<br />
The plugin does not add its own settings page, It uses WordPress Settings -> General. Look for it at the bottom of that page.</p>
<h3>Technical Details</h3>
<p>Supported versions:<br />
WordPress 4.x<br />
WordPress 5.x<br />
WordPress 6.x<br />
Yoast SEO 6.x-20.x</p>


Custom canonical URL for Yoast SEO

This plugin allows setting a default custom URL to be used as canonical. It is designed to work with Yoast SEO only.

activetwist

<p>AI-Native SEO without the theater. Explicit signals. Deterministic output. No scoring. No upsells.</p>
<h3>Designed by Refusal</h3>
<p>Active Twist SEO intentionally refuses:</p>
<ul>
<li>Content scoring</li>
<li>AI content generation</li>
<li>Telemetry / tracking</li>
<li>Upsells and feature gating</li>
<li>Dashboard bloat designed to create dependency</li>
</ul>
<p>Instead, it focuses on explicit, inspectable SEO signals.</p>
<h3>Built for Modern Indexing</h3>
<p>Active Twist SEO is built for search engines and AI crawlers:</p>
<ul>
<li>Machine-readable Markdown export</li>
<li>LLMs.txt generation</li>
<li>Raw JSON-LD preview and override</li>
<li>Deterministic schema selection by post type</li>
<li>Explicit canonical ownership</li>
<li>Robots.txt and sitemap controls</li>
</ul>
<h3>Capability Comparison</h3>
<p>✓ Rejects content scoring<br />
✓ Rejects AI content generation<br />
✓ Rejects upsells & feature gating<br />
✓ Rejects telemetry / tracking<br />
✓ Explicit canonical ownership<br />
✓ Raw JSON-LD preview<br />
✓ Markdown export for AI indexing<br />
✓ LLMs.txt generation</p>
<p>Most traditional SEO suites:<br />
• Include scoring systems<br />
• Include AI content tools<br />
• Gate features<br />
• Collect telemetry<br />
• Abstract canonical control<br />
• Hide structured data behind UI layers</p>
<p>Our plugin focuses on the foundational mechanics of modern SEO:</p>
<h3>Core SEO Controls</h3>
<ul>
<li>SEO title and meta description per post and page</li>
<li>Canonical URL ownership and per-page override</li>
<li>Robots meta control (index/noindex, follow/nofollow)</li>
<li>Deterministic fallback logic for all fields</li>
<li>Visible value source labels for all SEO fields (explicit, auto-generated, inherited)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Search Preview</h3>
<ul>
<li>Real-time Google search result preview</li>
<li>Live title and meta description rendering</li>
<li>Visual truncation and length guidance</li>
<li>Preview reflects actual rendered output, not scores</li>
</ul>
<h3>Structured Data (JSON-LD)</h3>
<ul>
<li>Site-wide Organization and WebSite schema</li>
<li>Optional LocalBusiness schema</li>
<li>Per-post Article and BlogPosting schema</li>
<li>Author (Person) schema sourced from WordPress user profiles</li>
<li>BreadcrumbList generation</li>
<li>Custom per-page JSON-LD override support</li>
<li>Per-page schema modes: automatic, custom, or disabled</li>
</ul>
<h3>Social Metadata</h3>
<ul>
<li>Open Graph metadata for Facebook and LinkedIn</li>
<li>Twitter Card metadata with configurable card type</li>
<li>Per-post social title, description, and image overrides</li>
<li>Deterministic fallback logic from SEO fields and featured images</li>
<li>Live Facebook and Twitter share previews in the editor</li>
</ul>
<h3>Markdown and AI Discovery</h3>
<ul>
<li>Native HTML-to-Markdown conversion</li>
<li>One-click Markdown download from post and page editor</li>
<li>Markdown download available from post and page list views</li>
<li>Machine-readable Markdown access via alternate content endpoint</li>
<li>Explicit support for AI and indexing agents without tracking or content generation</li>
</ul>
<h3>Site-Level SEO Files and Observability</h3>
<ul>
<li>XML sitemap generation</li>
<li>Virtual robots.txt editor</li>
<li>llms.txt generation</li>
<li>SEO Status dashboard with loopback inspection</li>
<li>Canonical conflict detection</li>
<li>Indexability and HTTP status reporting</li>
<li>Lightweight 404 monitoring</li>
<li>Site-wide health evaluation across recent public content</li>
<li>Zero output buffering to ensure deterministic, low-overhead rendering</li>
</ul>
<p>Active Twist SEO is designed to be boring in the best possible way. It does not generate content using AI, it does not track your competitors, and it does not sell you upgrades. Most importantly, it does not phone home or collect user data—your SEO strategy stays on your server.</p>
<p>It is designed to coexist safely with other SEO suites like Yoast or Rank Math, allowing you to gradually transition or use Active Twist as a lightweight alternative for specific deployments.</p>
<p>When Active Twist SEO output is enabled, it takes explicit ownership of canonical tags to ensure a single, deterministic source of truth.</p>


Active Twist SEO + JSON-LD

Deterministic SEO controls and JSON-LD for WordPress: titles, descriptions, canonicals, robots, and social metadata without tracking or AI.

Custom canonical URL for Yoast SEO vs Active Twist SEO + JSON-LD