Coywolf SEO

Coywolf SEO is built on a simple idea: an SEO plugin should give you exactly what you need, and nothing more. No upsells, no nags, no bloat, no features you have to turn off — just the essentials, done right, with the plugin doing the heavy lifting in the background.

Features:

• Site Details — one screen for your site’s identity: the Site Name and Tagline (editable right there), whether titles append the site name (em dash separated), the default Open Graph image, whether the site represents an Organization (with a full Schema.org property picker whose inputs match each property — URL, email, date, image upload, structured address and contact point) or a Person, the homepage title and description, and schema type defaults for posts and pages.
• Titles — clean titles composed from your settings. The site name is appended only where you turn it on. A force-rewrite option handles themes that build their own title markup.
• Meta description — by default the homepage uses your description (default: the Tagline), posts and pages use their manual excerpt, and terms use their description; nothing is auto-generated unless you turn on AI meta descriptions (see AI enrichment). One checkbox excludes meta descriptions entirely.
• Robots meta — index, follow, max-image-preview:large, max-snippet:-1, max-video-preview:-1 by default, each directive toggleable.
• Canonical links — on the homepage, posts, pages, categories, and tags, with pagination handled and a per-post canonical override.
• SEO section on posts and pages — an SEO panel in the block editor’s document sidebar (and a classic-editor meta box) to override the schema page/article type, set Noindex/Nofollow, or replace the canonical link.
• Duplicate Post — a Duplicate link under each post and page title (right next to Edit) copies it to a new draft: content, excerpt, categories and tags, featured image, page template, and custom fields included — your SEO settings among them. The draft belongs to whoever made it, WordPress assigns a fresh slug and date, and the original’s old-URL redirect history stays where it belongs, so the copy never competes with the original.
• Table of Contents block — builds its list when the page is served, not when the post is saved, so it can never go stale: headings get clean anchor links automatically (hand-set anchors are kept, duplicate headings de-duplicated), headings added by shortcodes and synced patterns are included, and every heading block gets its own “Exclude from table of contents” toggle. Pick which heading levels are listed (H2–H6), edit the title and its heading level, choose plain, bulleted, or hierarchical numbering (1, 1.1, 1.2…), make the table collapsible (works without JavaScript), and turn on smooth scrolling (reduced-motion preferences are respected), current-section highlighting while reading, and a scroll offset so sticky headers never cover a jumped-to heading. A minimum-headings threshold leaves the table off short posts, the markup is a semantic nav with properly nested lists, pages with the block declare the tableOfContents accessibility feature in their schema, and a Yoast table-of-contents block converts to this one in one click.
• Mobile alternative image — the core Image block gains an “Add mobile alternative” control: pick a phone-specific image (a different crop, dimensions, or content) and the plugin serves it on small screens through a picture element with a max-width: 768px media query, while larger screens keep the desktop image. Because it’s a real media query (art direction) rather than a srcset swap, the mobile image is guaranteed below the breakpoint instead of left to the browser’s candidate guesswork. The desktop image and its lightbox are untouched, and the breakpoint is filterable.
• Schema markup — one JSON-LD graph per page: WebSite, your Organization (with every property you added) or Person as the publisher, the typed WebPage, the typed Article with its author, and CollectionPage on category and tag archives.
• Authors — pick a user and the plugin imports their account details as Schema.org Person properties; add anything from the full Person catalog. Used as the author in Article markup.
• Open Graph — og: tags on the homepage, posts, pages, categories, and tags, with the featured image falling back to your default Open Graph image. No Twitter/X tags.
• Access rights — choose whether Editors can manage the plugin alongside Administrators.
• Takes over from other SEO plugins — with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, or The SEO Framework also active, their front-end output (titles, descriptions, schema, Open Graph, robots, canonical) and their edit-screen boxes and sidebars are suppressed through each plugin’s own switches, so nothing is duplicated while you migrate. Their sitemaps and redirects are left running.
• Hide the category prefix — serve category archives at /news/ instead of /category/news/, with 301 redirects from the old URLs.
• IndexNow — ping Bing the moment a post or page is published, updated, or deleted. The site key is generated for you and served virtually; no file is written.
• Native sitemap exclusions — drop the Posts, Pages, Categories, or Users sitemaps from WordPress’s own /wp-sitemap.xml; everything not excluded stays exactly as WordPress generates it.
• News sitemap — optionally serve /coywolf-news-sitemap.xml with articles from the last 48 hours; choose whether posts and/or pages are included and which categories are in or out.
• LLMs.txt & Markdown source endpoints (off by default; under Settings > Discovery) — make your site agent-readable. When enabled, the plugin serves a spec-conformant /llms.txt index of your public content (one H2 file-list per post type, plus an optional topic index that groups your articles under the AI-enriched entities they’re primarily about — an entity earns a section once it’s the primary subject of a configurable number of articles (default 2), and every link points back at your own pages, not at external knowledge), and exposes a Markdown source for every public page at …/index.html.md — the page’s fully-rendered content converted to Markdown from the same render path as the HTML, with YAML frontmatter (title, canonical URL, updated date, licence, and the page’s entities) and an X-Markdown-Tokens header. Each page also advertises its Markdown via a and answers Accept: text/markdown content negotiation (with Content-Location and Vary: Accept). Everything honors the same visibility as your sitemaps, is built entirely from on-site data with no external calls, and is never written over an llms.txt another plugin already owns. The settings nav groups this with IndexNow and Sitemaps under a new Discovery section.
• AI enrichment — bring your own API key for Claude (Anthropic), OpenAI, or Google Gemini (pick one in Settings) and it analyzes each post in the background as it is published: main subjects land in the Article schema’s about property, passing references in mentions, each grounded to a real Wikidata item with its Wikipedia page in sameAs. The model only ever extracts entity names — real candidates are looked up on Wikidata’s public API, the model chooses among them, and the chosen item’s type is verified — so identifiers are never invented. When new entities land, the page’s cache is purged so the schema is served immediately. Enrich-all runs go through the selected service’s Batch API at roughly half the standard token price, with live progress, pause/resume/cancel, and a lifetime average-cost-per-post readout. Turn on automatic meta descriptions and it also writes a faithful sub-200-character summary of each post on publish or update — used in the meta description, Open Graph, and Article schema — and the option steps aside whenever meta descriptions are excluded. The key can live in wp-config.php. The AI features use WordPress 7.0’s bundled AI client and require WordPress 7.0 or higher.
• Image Text — generate alt text, captions, titles, and descriptions for your Media Library images with the same AI service — one image at a time from the block editor, or in bulk across the whole library. The bulk run processes in the background (through the Batch API at roughly half price, or in real time on demand), so you can leave the page. Alt text is intentionally left empty for purely decorative images, an accessibility best practice, and the prompt is WCAG-aware. New alt text and captions can propagate into the matching core/image blocks already in your content, and a “Fix missing image IDs” tool re-attaches Media Library IDs to images inserted without one — converting Custom HTML or classic image figures into real image blocks along the way.
• Redirects — a full redirect manager on one screen: quick-add a rule in seconds (exact or regex with capture groups, query strings ignored/passed/matched exactly, 301/302/307/308/410), test any URL against your rules before trusting the live site, and watch hit counts to see which rules still matter. The moment you delete a published post or page, the plugin asks right there on the list screen what to do with its URL — mark it gone (410), redirect it, or dismiss — and pending decisions also wait on the Redirects page. When the Redirection plugin is active, Coywolf SEO takes over URL redirects: Redirection’s URL redirects are switched off while this feature is on so they don’t conflict with yours, and a notice points it out so you can import its rules and deactivate it (its 404/410, random, and site-wide HTTPS/www redirects keep running until you do).
• Link Manager — scans every link in your posts and pages and lists them with their HTTP response, internal/external type, and the posts and pages each one appears in, so broken links and redirects are easy to spot. Fix them in place — remove a link, replace a redirect with its destination, or change a link’s URL everywhere it appears — one at a time or in bulk. Ignore individual URLs, whole domains, or wildcard patterns, with a separate Ignored view. After the first analysis the inventory keeps itself current as posts and pages change.
• Robots.txt Manager — manage robots.txt from the WordPress admin as a table of named, plain-English rules. A guided editor builds the correct Disallow/Allow directive by rule type and targets all robots, custom bots, or whole categories from the bundled Cloudflare Bot Directory; every rule is conflict-checked and testable against a URL before you save — all powered by a PHP port of Google’s open-source Robots.txt Parser and Matcher Library (the Robots Exclusion Protocol / RFC 9309 reference implementation Googlebot itself uses), so each rule is validated and previewed exactly the way Google will interpret it: * wildcards, $ end-anchors, percent-encoding, and longest-match Allow/Disallow precedence all included. Serve robots.txt virtually (WordPress serves it with your managed rules injected) or write a real file with your hand-written lines preserved. On activation it imports and tidies an existing robots.txt. Sitemap URLs and physical/virtual mode live in Settings; rules import and export as JSON on the Import/Export page.
• Import/Export — download the plugin settings, author properties, and redirect rules as JSON and import them on another site. API keys are never exported.

Troubleshooting

• No new tags on the front end? Purge your page and CDN caches (including host-level edge caching) — cached pages keep serving pre-activation HTML. The plugin purges the common cache plugins on activation, but host and CDN caches are outside its reach.
• No Article schema on a page? Pages default to no Article type (Site Details > Pages); set a default there or override per page in the SEO panel.
• No meta description on a post? By default it comes only from a manual excerpt — turn on AI meta descriptions to generate one automatically, or exclude meta descriptions entirely in Settings.
• Nothing at all? The theme must call wp_head() — all output renders there.

Privacy

Privacy-first: this plugin includes no analytics, no tracking, and no data gathering — nothing about you, your site, or your visitors is ever collected. Outbound connections happen only for features you turn on, and each is detailed under “External services” below: with IndexNow enabled, the changed URL is sent to Microsoft Bing’s IndexNow endpoint on publish, update, and delete; with AI enrichment or Image Text enabled, the post title and content — and, for Image Text, the image itself — are sent to the AI service you choose (Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google Gemini) using your own API key, and extracted entity names are looked up on Wikidata’s public API; and with the Link Manager enabled, the plugin requests the URLs you have linked to in your own content to check whether they still work. Nothing else, nowhere else.

External services

This plugin can connect to the third-party services below. Each is optional and is contacted only when you enable the feature that uses it; none are contacted on a default install.

AI provider — Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google Gemini (you choose one)

Used by AI Schema enrichment, AI meta descriptions, and Image Text. When you enable an AI feature and supply your own API key, the plugin sends content to the single service you selected in Settings:

• AI Schema enrichment sends a post or page’s title and text content when it is published or updated (or when you run “Enrich all content”), so the model can extract entity names.
• AI meta descriptions, when enabled, send a post’s content on publish/update to generate a short summary.
• Image Text sends the image (and the surrounding post text for context) when you generate text for an image or run the bulk job.

Requests are authenticated with the API key you provide and are sent only to the one service you select. Terms and privacy policy for each:

• Anthropic (Claude) — Terms: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms — Privacy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
• OpenAI — Terms: https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use/ — Privacy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/
• Google Gemini API — Terms: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms — Privacy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Wikidata (Wikimedia Foundation)

Used by AI Schema enrichment to ground entities to real identifiers. The entity-name strings extracted from your content are sent as lookups to Wikidata’s public API (https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php); no API key and no personal data are involved. Terms: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Terms_of_Use — Privacy: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Privacy_policy

IndexNow (Microsoft Bing)

Used by the IndexNow feature. When enabled, the URL of a post or page you publish, update, or delete — together with the auto-generated site key — is submitted to Bing’s IndexNow endpoint (https://www.bing.com/indexnow) so search engines can recrawl it promptly. No personal data is sent. About IndexNow: https://www.indexnow.org/ — Microsoft Privacy Statement: https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement

Link checking (the sites you link to)

Not a third-party service, noted here for transparency: when the Link Manager is enabled, it sends HTTP HEAD (and, if needed, GET) requests to the URLs you have linked to in your posts and pages to record each link’s HTTP status. Those requests go to the sites you chose to link to — never to Coywolf or any other service — and carry only an ordinary request with a plugin User-Agent; no information about your site or your visitors is transmitted.