PublishRank Wordpress Plugin - Rating, Reviews, Demo & Download
Plugin Description
PublishRank is a free, open-source WordPress SEO plugin for site owners, bloggers, news publishers, newspapers, magazines and editorial teams. It brings core technical SEO workflows into one publisher-focused plugin and can be evaluated as an alternative to Yoast SEO, Rank Math and other WordPress SEO plugins. Compare the feature set with your current setup before switching; features and workflows are not identical across plugins.
Copyright and project rights: Muhammad Umar Jabbar.
Features include:
- SEO titles, descriptions, canonicals, robots directives, Open Graph and X/Twitter metadata.
- Connected JSON-LD schema for organizations, people, webpages, articles, breadcrumbs and supported media/content types.
- XML sitemaps for posts, pages, taxonomies, authors, images and videos, including a Google News sitemap.
- Redirect management and a privacy-conscious local 404 monitor with normalized paths, grouped browser/mobile/crawler hits, referrer paths without query strings, noise suppression for assets and infrastructure probes, throttled and locked bounded writes, 90-day retention, searchable/sortable review, clearable logs, and same-site redirect creation.
- Per-article author schema overrides for author name, job title and image, plus selectable Article, NewsArticle and BlogPosting types.
- Global and per-content robots directives, including index/noindex and follow/nofollow controls, plus configurable robots.txt rules.
- Robots.txt controls, hreflang support and breadcrumbs.
- IndexNow notifications and manual URL submission (optional; sends eligible public URLs to the IndexNow service when enabled).
- Configurable llms.txt and optional llms-full.txt resources, with a public paginated schema-discovery endpoint linked from llms.txt.
- Editorial SEO analysis, internal-link recommendations, sitemap diagnostics and WP-CLI commands.
- Publisher Toolkit with a read-only pre-publication checklist for drafts, pending and scheduled stories; permission-aware bulk SEO metadata editing; role-based access; and optional image alt-text assistance that preserves existing descriptions.
- Optional built-in WP Hide Login module with a custom login endpoint, configurable slug, administration URL rewriting where Apache rules are available, and 404 protection for direct default paths.
- Always-on technical source provenance markers in page source; they do not add a promotional link or visible footer credit.
PublishRank does not guarantee rankings, crawling, indexing, traffic, or inclusion in Google News. IndexNow is not supported by Google.
Source code
PublishRank includes reviewable PHP, JavaScript and CSS source. The maintained source repository is github.com/Umarjaum/PublishRank. First-party runtime assets in assets/ are shipped unminified and human-readable, with corresponding first-party sources in src/assets/. Font Awesome Free 7.3.1 is bundled locally under assets/vendor/fontawesome-free-7.3.1/ with its upstream license. There is no build step or third-party asset CDN request.
Documentation
- In WordPress: PublishRank Documentation & Help explains titles, variables, output controls, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, schema, robots, redirects, the robust 404 Monitor, IndexNow, Baidu, diagnostics, the admin menu and toolbar, the sitemap browser view, versions and troubleshooting.
- In the package:
docs/features/FEATURES.mdlists every dashboard feature and Technical Health check provided through version 2.9.110. Thedocs/folder also contains guides for sitemaps, branding, admin navigation, the 404 Monitor, troubleshooting, versioning and a WordPress 7.1.3 compatibility checklist. - Online: publishrankseo.vercel.app.
Privacy
PublishRank does not include visitor analytics or send publisher content to PublishRank. Core metadata and schema are generated locally. The technical source marker does not contain an external link. Optional integrations below make requests only when configured or explicitly enabled; remote services and OAuth providers may receive the originating server or browser IP address and standard connection metadata. Review the relevant provider policies and your own privacy obligations before enabling an integration.
Terms and Conditions
PublishRank is provided under the GPLv2-or-later license. The plugin does not guarantee rankings, crawling, indexing, traffic, or inclusion in Google News. Technical provenance markers are always present in public HTML source.
External Services
Google Search Console (optional, your own Google OAuth client). Nothing is sent to Google until an administrator saves their own Google OAuth client ID and secret on the Search Console screen and selects Sign in with Google. The administrator’s browser is then sent to Google’s OAuth page (accounts.google.com) and returns to this site’s callback URL; the authorization code is exchanged directly between this WordPress server and Google (oauth2.googleapis.com) using PKCE. PublishRank requests only the read-only webmasters.readonly scope. The client secret and the refresh token are stored encrypted with WordPress salts; no PublishRank-operated server is involved and no Google data is sent to PublishRank. On connection, then hourly (WP-Cron) and when an administrator clicks Refresh, the server asks the Google Search Console API (www.googleapis.com) for the verified property list and sends the selected property, date ranges and search type to retrieve daily, hourly, query, page, Discover and Google News totals. A URL Inspection action also sends the entered public page URL, property and WordPress locale. Returned metrics are cached locally. Disconnect asks Google to revoke the grant (oauth2.googleapis.com/revoke) and deletes the stored credentials and cached data. Google may also be opened in the administrator’s browser for the optional Rich Results Test, which receives the public URL the administrator chose to test. Google policies: Google API Services User Data Policy, Google APIs Terms, and Google Privacy Policy. PublishRank’s use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
IndexNow (optional). When enabled, eligible public URLs are submitted after supported publish/update/delete events, manual submission, or a retry. The request to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow/ includes the site’s host, IndexNow key, public key-location URL and submitted URL list. The plugin keeps a bounded local submission history including URLs and response statuses. Acceptance is not proof of crawling or indexing, and Google does not participate in IndexNow. The official IndexNow Terms of Service identify Yandex, Seznam and Microsoft as sponsors. See their Yandex Privacy Policy, Seznam Privacy Policy and Microsoft Privacy Statement.
Baidu Search Resource Platform submission (optional). An administrator can submit up to 2,000 same-host public URLs manually, or explicitly enable automatic submission for newly published eligible posts. The request is sent over HTTPS to the Baidu endpoint configured by the publisher and includes the submitted URL list; the endpoint URL itself contains the publisher’s Baidu site identifier and token. The endpoint is encrypted in the WordPress database; Baidu receives the endpoint credentials and URLs to process the request. A bounded local history stores response counts/status, not the submitted URLs or response body. A submission is not an indexing guarantee. See the Baidu Search Resource Platform Agreement, Baidu Privacy Protection Statement, and Baidu Disclaimer.
Publisher diagnostics (optional, administrator-triggered). The live frontend scan requests the site’s own homepage, latest article, sitemap index and up to ten same-origin child sitemaps from the site’s server and analyzes the returned HTML/XML locally. It does not follow HTTP redirects, and sitemap child URLs on another origin are not requested. The IndexNow key check requests the site’s own public key file. Publisher Link Intelligence analyzes locally available site data. Only when an administrator ticks Also check external links and starts a scan, the site’s server sends HEAD/GET requests to the external URLs already linked in the site’s own content to read their HTTP status; nothing else is sent and no data is shared with PublishRank.
Traffic Guard (optional, local-only). When enabled, validated request IPs and configured IP/CIDR and country rules are compared locally. The plugin reads CF-Connecting-IP, X-Forwarded-For, or CF-IPCountry only when the direct network peer is inside an administrator-configured trusted-proxy CIDR. It makes no GeoIP API requests, stores no per-visitor IP address, and sends no Traffic Guard data to PublishRank or another service. Country rules require a trusted proxy that supplies a valid country header; missing or invalid country data is allowed through. Country geolocation is approximate, and this feature is not a WAF or DDoS defense. Administrator requests and key WordPress recovery, API, feed, robots, and sitemap routes are exempt. When a request would be blocked and its User-Agent claims to be a major search-engine crawler, the server performs a reverse DNS lookup of the visiting IP and a forward lookup of the returned host name to confirm it (the verdict is cached under a salted hash, not the IP). These are DNS lookups made by your server, not HTTP requests, and no data is sent to PublishRank.
Other website links in the administration interface (including the Schema.org vocabulary and links to provider documentation) are ordinary references, not background API integrations. PublishRank’s source-provenance markers are technical metadata only; the plugin does not insert a visible footer credit or promotional link.
PublishRank Newsroom
PublishRank includes a built-in editorial newsroom for story pitches and assignments, configurable workflow stages, reporter/editor assignments, planning board, calendar, private notes and discussion, attachments, audit history, CSV export, notifications, and publishing handoff to WordPress drafts. The module uses dedicated newsroom capabilities and retains newsroom records and settings when updated. Attachments are stored outside the public document root when the server provides a writable private directory; legacy uploads are migrated on an authorized admin request. New uploads are blocked if private storage cannot be established. Assignment, stage, overdue-reminder, and discussion alerts appear in a dismissible wp-admin pop-up and the Newsroom notification inbox; users can manage email, in-app, and pop-up preferences under Newsroom My Notifications. Alerts poll while logged into wp-admin and do not request browser notification permission.
Screenshots
No screenshots provided
