Hiland Connector

Hiland Connector connects your site to Hiland Content Engine, an SEO content service run by HilandSEO Technology Limited. Hiland diagnoses your pages and suggests better SEO titles, meta descriptions and copy. WordPress’s own REST API cannot reach the fields of SEO plugins or the text of Elementor pages, so this plugin gives Hiland a small, safe API for exactly those things.

You need a Hiland Content Engine account to use it: the plugin is the connection, and the analysis and suggestions happen in Hiland. Without an account, the plugin does nothing on its own.

Hiland can change, on pages, posts, WooCommerce products and their categories:

• the SEO title and meta description, in the fields of Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO (pages, posts and products) or SEOPress;
• text in Elementor widgets: headings, text, buttons, accordions, toggles, tabs, icon lists and similar. Changes are saved through Elementor, so the page and its CSS are rebuilt;
• an exact piece of visible text in a page made with the block editor or the classic editor (plain text only: never markup, and never text inside a script, a stylesheet or a form field);
• the alt text of images;
• Hiland modules (an intro, a list of links, or an FAQ with FAQPage structured data) that you place on a page with the [hiland_module id="…"] shortcode or the Hiland module block.

This plugin’s routes cannot create, publish, unpublish or delete pages or posts, change their addresses, or change layouts, styles, menus, your theme, settings, plugins, users, prices or stock. You review every change to your pages in Hiland before it is applied. When Hiland publishes an article to your site, or updates one it published, it also sets that post’s meta description in your SEO plugin.

Safe by design

• The plugin creates and stores no credentials. Hiland signs in with a WordPress application password that you approve for it on WordPress’s own Authorize Application screen, when you add your site in Hiland.
• An application password works across WordPress’s whole REST API, not only this plugin’s routes: Hiland can do whatever its user can. So approve Hiland as a user of its own with the Editor role (see the FAQ), which can change content but not plugins, themes, users or settings. Hiland needs nothing more. You can revoke the password at any time in the user’s profile.
• Deactivating or deleting the plugin revokes the application passwords approved for Hiland.
• Before every change Hiland says what it expects to find. If the page was edited since Hiland last read it, nothing is changed.
• Every change is logged with what it replaced. Settings → Hiland Connector lists the latest changes, each with an Undo button that works as long as the page has not been changed again since.
• The plugin writes no files, makes no requests to other sites, collects no statistics and runs no code it receives.

External services

This plugin does not contact any external service itself: it makes no outgoing requests, loads nothing from other sites and sends no data anywhere on its own.

It adds REST API routes to your site (under /wp-json/hiland/v1/) that Hiland Content Engine calls. Hiland Content Engine is an external service, provided by HilandSEO Technology Limited at https://ai.hilandseo.com/. It can call these routes only after you approve an application password for it, on WordPress’s Authorize Application screen when you add your site in Hiland (or create one in a user’s profile and enter it in Hiland); it then signs in as the user the password belongs to, and WordPress lets it read and change only what that user can, through these routes and WordPress’s own REST API.

What Hiland reads, and when. When you connect your site, when Hiland checks the connection, when it publishes or updates an article on your site, and when you analyse or optimise your site in Hiland, it reads:

• the site’s address, its WordPress, PHP and plugin versions, the active theme, and which SEO plugin, page builder and WooCommerce are active;
• your pages, posts, WooCommerce products and their categories: title, address, status, dates, SEO title, meta description, focus keyword, noindex and canonical settings, and their text;
• your images’ addresses, titles and alt text;
• this plugin’s modules and change log.

What Hiland writes, and when. When you apply a change you reviewed in Hiland: SEO titles and meta descriptions, text in Elementor widgets and in block-editor or classic content, image alt text, and Hiland modules. And when Hiland publishes an article written in Hiland to your site, or updates one it published there (which you do in Hiland, or schedule with Hiland’s AutoBlog): that post’s meta description, in your SEO plugin, and only if the post’s description is still what Hiland just read. Every change is logged on your site and can be undone from Settings → Hiland Connector.

The data Hiland reads is sent from your site to Hiland’s servers, in answer to Hiland’s requests, and is used to provide the service. Hiland Content Engine’s Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy apply to it.

The FAQ module’s structured data names the schema.org vocabulary ("@context": "https://schema.org"); nothing is loaded from schema.org.