Orbitstem SEO

Description

Most SEO plugins help you write a title, give you a green light, and stop there. Orbitstem SEO keeps watching your site after you hit Publish. It finds broken links, redirect chains and pages that quietly dropped out of search. It warns you when a theme or plugin update breaks your SEO. It fixes what can be fixed safely, and every change it makes can be undone.

Everything is free. There is no Premium version, no add-ons, no account and no upsell banners.

Three promises

1. No Premium version, ever. Every feature is in this free plugin.
2. No account, no tracking. No data leaves your site unless you switch on a feature that needs it (and the readme says exactly what it sends).
3. Every change can be undone. Repairs, redirects, imports and risky edits are recorded with a one-click undo.

Free here, often a paid upgrade elsewhere

Feature
Orbitstem SEO

Redirect manager with 404 log
Free

Automatic 301 redirect when you change a URL
Free

Facebook and X (Twitter) previews
Free

Up to 5 keyphrases with synonyms
Free

Internal link suggestions while you write
Free

FAQ, HowTo, Product, Recipe, Event, Course, JobPosting, Review and Video schema
Free

Local SEO: address, opening hours, LocalBusiness schema
Free

WooCommerce Product schema (price, stock, reviews)
Free

Image, video and news sitemaps
Free

Block AI crawlers in one click
Free

Broken link checker
Free

Automatic 301 redirects when you change a URL

Change the address (slug) of a published post or page, and the old address redirects to the new one at once, so visitors, bookmarks and search engines never hit a “page not found”. Pages below it (child pages) are redirected too, and older redirects are pointed straight at the new address, so you never get a chain. The Repair Center then offers to update the links in your other posts. Every address change is recorded and can be undone.

Writing: a sidebar that helps, without a score race

• Search preview for Google, on desktop and mobile, with length guidance for the title and description.
• Facebook and X previews, with a social title, description and image when you want them different from what search engines show.
• Up to five keyphrases with synonyms. Plain advice such as “Mention the focus keyphrase in the first paragraph”, plus a warning when a keyphrase is repeated so often that it reads like stuffing. No colored score to chase.
• Readability tips: long sentences, long paragraphs, missing subheadings and (in English) passive voice.
• Links panel: which posts link here, broken links in this post, and suggested links to your other posts, each with the exact sentence and an “Add link” button.
• Pre-publish check: when you click Publish, real problems only, with one-click fixes where possible. For example, the page is set to noindex, there’s no description, another page already uses this title, an image has no alt text, or the post links to nothing.

SEO Issues: a scan that shows the evidence

A background scan looks at your whole site and lists what needs attention, with the exact posts, links and addresses involved and how to fix each one:

• broken internal links and images, and (optional) broken links to other sites;
• links that go through a redirect, redirect chains and loops;
• content that no other post links to;
• pages competing for the same search (same keyphrase or near-identical titles);
• sitemap entries that fail, redirect, are noindex or point elsewhere, and indexable content missing from the sitemap;
• duplicate or conflicting SEO tags printed by the theme or another plugin.

Switch on “Explain like I’m new” to get one plain sentence per issue: what it is, why it matters, what to do.

Repair Center: fixes you can preview and undo

• Update links that go through a redirect, so they point straight at the final page.
• Flatten redirect chains into a single step.
• Update links to pages whose address changed.
• Orphan rescue: add links to pages nothing links to, from posts that already mention them.
• Remove broken internal links while keeping their text (always asks first).

Each repair shows exactly what will change before you apply it, is checked afterwards, and can be rolled back. If you want, the safe repairs run automatically after each scan, with the same checks.

Watching your site for you

• Update guard: right after any theme, plugin or WordPress update, Orbitstem SEO checks ten key pages and warns you at once if the update removed a title, broke a canonical, added noindex or a second H1, or dropped your schema.
• Change history (Repair > History): every SEO change on the site, who made it and when, grouped by day. That includes repairs, redirects, address and noindex changes, imports, and theme, plugin and WordPress updates. If traffic drops on a Tuesday, you can see what changed on Monday. Changes made by Orbitstem have an Undo button.
• Change Guardian: before you change a page’s address, set it to noindex or trash it, you see what depends on it. “Trash (check impact)” lets you choose a redirect before a page is removed.
• Regression Monitor: weekly snapshots of what every page tells search engines, compared over time, with unexplained changes flagged.
• SEO health email, weekly or monthly (optional): what was fixed, what changed, what needs attention. It’s sent from your own site.

Schema (structured data)

One connected JSON-LD graph per page: WebSite, Organization or Person, WebPage, Article and BreadcrumbList. Add a rich result to any post from the sidebar: FAQ, HowTo, Product, Recipe, Event, Course, JobPosting, Review or Video.

The sidebar says in plain words what is still missing. An incomplete rich result is left out of the page, so search engines never see half-filled data. It also links to Google’s Rich Results Test.

• YouTube videos in your posts get video schema automatically.
• WooCommerce products get full Product schema: price or price range, stock, SKU, brand, GTIN, ratings and the newest reviews. WooCommerce’s simpler markup is replaced, so there is one Product, not two.
• Local SEO: business type, address, phone, opening hours and coordinates become LocalBusiness schema on your homepage. The [orbitstem_business] shortcode shows the same details to visitors.

Sitemaps

• XML sitemaps built on WordPress’s own, leaving out noindexed items, items with a canonical elsewhere, and anything you switch off per post. Last-modified dates are included.
• Image sitemap, video sitemap and (for news publishers) a Google News sitemap, listed in robots.txt automatically.
• “Why isn’t this page in my sitemap?” is answered in plain words, from the command line (wp orbitstem-seo why 42) as well.

Redirects and 404s

• 301, 302, 307 and 308 redirects and 410 Gone, exact or pattern-based, with hit counts. Rules can never redirect the admin area, login page or REST API, so you cannot lock yourself out.
• A 404 log of what visitors could not find (paths and hit counts only, never IP addresses). It also groups missing addresses by folder, such as /old-shop/…, so you can fix a whole folder with one redirect.
• Import and export redirects as CSV. Import from Redirection, Yoast SEO Premium and Rank Math with a preview, and undo the whole import in one click.
• Export as Apache (.htaccess) or nginx rules, so very large sites can answer redirects before WordPress loads.

Crawlers, AI and staging

• robots.txt editor: extra rules are added to WordPress’s robots.txt, and every change can be undone.
• Block AI crawlers one by one (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, PerplexityBot and more), each with a plain note on what it does.
• llms.txt (optional): a short guide to your site that AI tools can read to understand and quote it correctly.
• Staging protection: on a copy WordPress knows is not live (WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE set to staging, development or local, or a localhost or .test address), every page asks search engines not to index it, so a test copy never competes with your live site. Apart from addresses that cannot be reached from the internet (localhost, .test, .local and similar), it does not guess from the web address: names like staging.example.com only get a suggestion to set WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE. A clear warning shows on every admin screen while it is active. While another SEO plugin is active, Orbitstem is in safe mode and staging protection is paused; its pages say so. On a live site, you’re warned if “Discourage search engines” was left on after going live.
• Empty archives: optionally noindex category and tag pages that have no posts.

Instant indexing with IndexNow (optional)

When you publish, update, move or remove content, Orbitstem SEO can notify search engines that support IndexNow (for example Microsoft Bing), so they recrawl the page sooner. A log in Settings shows every submission and the answer. It’s off until you switch it on. Google does not use IndexNow; it finds your changes through your sitemap.

Bulk editing and spreadsheets

• Edit SEO titles, descriptions and noindex for many items in one table.
• Export to CSV, edit in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice, and import again. You can also change page addresses (slugs) in bulk: each changed address gets its 301 redirect automatically. You see a preview of every change before anything is saved, and the import can be undone in one click.

Switching from another SEO plugin

• Import titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, robots settings and focus keyphrases from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress and The SEO Framework, plus Yoast SEO’s title templates.
• Compare before you switch: see what your pages print now next to what Orbitstem SEO will print, for sample pages, before anything changes.
• Only empty fields are filled, the other plugin’s data is never changed, and the import can be rolled back.
• While another SEO plugin is active, Orbitstem SEO prints no head tags (safe mode) and tells you why, so you never get duplicate titles.

Setup in three minutes

A short wizard asks what kind of site this is (blog, shop, local business, company or personal) and who is behind it. It brings over data from your old SEO plugin and runs the first scan. You end on a dashboard that shows the few things worth fixing first, not forty.

For developers

• WP-CLI: wp orbitstem-seo scan, issues, redirects list|export|import, snapshot, why <post-id>, indexnow <url>.
• Filters such as orbitstem_seo_head_tags, orbitstem_seo_schema, orbitstem_seo_staging_guard and orbitstem_seo_indexnow_send.

Also from the developer

Media Rename — OrbitStem renames images and other media files safely: every link is updated, old addresses redirect, and every rename can be undone. Free, like this plugin. The two plugins work independently.

External services

Orbitstem SEO works on your own server. It contacts other services only for the optional features below, which are off until you switch them on.

IndexNow (Settings > Automation > Instant indexing). When you publish, update, move or remove a post, the plugin sends the following to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow:
* the changed addresses of your site;
* your site’s host name;
* a verification key it created.

IndexNow shares them with the participating search engines. Nothing about visitors or users is sent. Submissions are logged in Settings. IndexNow terms.

Check external links (Settings > Checks & history). During scans, the plugin sends one request to each website your content links to, at most once a week per address, to see whether the link still works. Nothing beyond the request itself is sent.

Links only, nothing loaded. The editor’s “Test in Google’s Rich Results Test” link and the “Get directions” link of the [orbitstem_business] shortcode are plain links. Nothing is sent unless someone clicks them. Video schema and the video sitemap point at YouTube’s thumbnail and player addresses for videos in your content, without fetching anything from YouTube.