Hydrogen SEO 0.0.29: Author and Date Archive Controls and RSS Feed Text

Hydrogen SEO 0.0.29 adds two settings for pages and feeds that WordPress creates on its own. Author and date archives can now each be indexed, kept out of search results or switched off entirely. And RSS feed text puts a line of your choice, with links, before or after every post in your feeds, so automatic copies of your posts point back to you. Import SEO Data brings both across from your previous SEO plugin. Everything here is free and needs no account.

Update from Plugins → Installed Plugins as usual. Nothing on your site changes until you change a setting: author archives stay noindex, date archives stay indexed, and feeds stay as they were.

Author and date archives: index, no index or disabled

WordPress makes an author archive for each user who publishes (/author/jane/) and a date archive for every year, month and day with posts (/2026/10/). Until now Hydrogen SEO gave author archives a fixed noindex, follow and left date archives indexed, with no way to change either.

Open Hydrogen SEO → Titles & Meta → Archives. The Author archives and Date archives cards each have three choices:

• Index: listed in search results (index, follow).
• No index: visitors can open the archive, and search engines are asked to leave it out (noindex, follow).
• Disabled: the archive's addresses redirect with a 301. Pages such as /author/jane/page/2/, ?author=1 and ?m=202610 go to the homepage, and feeds such as /author/jane/feed/ and /2026/10/feed/ go to your main feed. Searches filtered by date or author keep working.

The defaults are what you had before: No index for author archives and Index for date archives. WordPress's own Discourage search engines option under Settings → Reading still wins: with it on, the whole site is noindex, archives included.

Which to choose depends on the site:

• One author: the author archive is the blog under another address. Keep it on No index, or choose Disabled if nothing should link to it.
• Several authors with their own following: Index lets a search for a writer's name find the page listing their work.
• Date archives: few people search for a month, so No index is the usual answer, and Disabled once you know nothing on the site links to them.

Nothing points at a redirect

When author archives are disabled, Hydrogen SEO stops linking to them. The author url in Article schema and the uploader link in the video sitemap use the website from the author's WordPress profile instead, and are left out when the profile has none. The archive's title format is not used while it is disabled, and the field says so.

Redirects you add in the Redirection Manager are still checked first, so you can point one particular author's address at your team page and let the setting handle everyone else.

The full reference is in author and date archives. For working out the right setting for your own site, see should you noindex author and date archives?

RSS feed text

Hydrogen SEO → General has a new RSS Feed section with two fields, Before each post and After each post. Whatever you type there is added to every post in your RSS and Atom feeds, in the full text and in the summary. The usual starting point is:

The post %post_link% appeared first on %site_link%.

Three variables print links:

• %post_link% prints the post's title as a link to it.
• %site_link% prints the name of your site as a link to its front page.
• %author_link% prints who wrote the post, as a link to their author archive, or to their profile website if author archives are disabled.

The title variables you already use, such as %title%, %site_name%, %author_name% and %published%, work too, and their values are escaped so a stray & in a post title cannot break the feed. Preview in a feed reader, next to the fields, shows the lines on a sample post as you type.

Why it matters: some sites republish feeds automatically, taking each post's content as it arrives. With a line in the feed, those copies carry a link back to your post, which credits you to their readers and shows search engines where the post came from. It does not stop copying, but it turns the routine copies into links to the original.

Both fields are empty by default, and empty means nothing is added. Comment feeds are not changed. See RSS feed text for examples and how to check your feed, and what to put in your RSS feed footer for advice on wording it.

Import SEO Data

Switching plugins? The importer under Tools now carries both of these across as well:

• Archive settings. If your old plugin redirected or turned off an author or date archive, it becomes Disabled here. If it only noindexed one, or left it indexed, you get No index or Index to match.
• RSS before and after text. The old plugin's tags are translated as part of the import: its post, site and author link tags turn into the three new link variables, the rest into their Hydrogen SEO counterparts.

As with every import, the dry run lists these values before anything is saved, and Undo puts back what you had. The import guide has the details.

Performance

Neither feature adds a database query to any page; we measured before and after. When both RSS fields are empty, the feed code is not loaded at all.

After updating

1. Decide on author archives. If your site has one author, No index (the default) is fine and Disabled is an option. If it has several writers people search for by name, consider Index.
2. Decide on date archives. Most sites can move them to No index. Check first whether your theme links to them, in a sidebar archive widget for example, before choosing Disabled.
3. Add a feed line if your posts are syndicated or have been copied before. The post %post_link% appeared first on %site_link%. is a sound default.

None of these is required. The plugin behaves exactly as 0.0.28 did until you change them.