Why does Yoast mis-count the number of words and not see keywords in Headings?

  • Resolved johnnyivan

    (@johnnyivan)


    6 years, 8 months ago

    Hi All,

    I’m very grateful for this free software, but I find that I just have to question or ignore some of what it tells me.

    Q: Why does Yoast mis-count the number of words and not necessarily see keywords in Headings, in pages and posts?

    In my linked page, it counts 827 words, whereas there are only 140. There are however 837 characters.

    Q: When I type into the ‘focus keyword’ field, should that be 1 word, or can it be more? And if it can be more words, do they have to appear together in the same order?

    In another page, I put in ‘editorial illustration’ as the focus keyword, and even though it’s in the first paragraph, Yoast tells me that it isn’t. I deleted the shortcode as an experiement, and it still protests that it isn’t there.

    John

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support devnihil

    (@devnihil)

    @johnnyivan We’ve addressed your concerns below:

    Q: Why does Yoast mis-count the number of words and not necessarily see keywords in Headings, in pages and posts?

    Can you let us know if you are using a pagebuilder plugin such as Visual Composer, Site Origin, Beaver Builder etc to create your page’s content? The SEO and readability analysis featurescan sometimes not work correctly if you are using some kind of visual page builder, as they can cause the page’s content to not be accessible to the plugin due to it being created outside the functions of the standard WordPress page editor.
    ?
    Also, in some cases, HTML code for images, styles, iframe, videos may interfere with our page analysis’ ability to identify the first paragraph. We are aware of the issue and are working on a solution. We have additional information about this issue at the following link: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/warning-focus-keyword-not-in-first-paragraph/. A workaround to this is to create the content from within the standard WordPress editor. We have additional information available on this issue at the following link: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/error-text-contains-0-words/
    ?
    ?If you are receiving this warning and you have confirmed that the focus keyword is present you can ignore this warning.

    Q: When I type into the ‘focus keyword’ field, should that be 1 word, or can it be more? And if it can be more words, do they have to appear together in the same order?

    The focus keyword can be more than one word as in a long tail keyword. However, the keyword does have to appear in the exact order as it is input in the focus keyword tab.

    Thread Starter johnnyivan

    (@johnnyivan)

    Hi Devnihil,
    Thanks for the response!

    A. No, I’m not using anything but the standard, simple off-the-shelf editor in WordPress.

    I’ve also just checked how much text is in the resulting HTML—in the browser, because I’ve noticed in the past that WP can’t throw in a LOT of extra code. But no, it looks clean and there’s nothing more than about 140 words even with P tags etc. (using WordPress’ system for cacheing images on their own server creates a lot of giberish code. I won’t use it on this site).

    However… I’ve just tried removing the Jetpack portfolio shortcode, and now the word-count is accurate. Yoast usually seems to instantly detect (impressive!) the difference even without saving the file, but not always. So that’s the issue on this page. I’ll test the wordcount now on a simple page with nothing but text.
    https://johnwhiteillustrator.com/yoast-word-count-test/
    It’s working perfectly, and also detecting the long-tail keyword ‘word count’ everywhere that it should. Nice job.

    2. Regarding the long-tail keyword: Is it really critically important to search engines that the word-order is the same everywhere in the page? Google, I think, has said before that the perfectly optimised page will probably be penalised, because the amount of optimisation could look cycnically strategically contrived in order to trick them. I’ve heard that because their algorythm is so intelligent now, that synonymns and variations on keywords can actually be a good idea.

    As for where I said in my original post, that Yoast wasn’t detecting a keyword that definitely is in the 1st paragraph ‘editorial illustration’ — it seems that that is due to those 2 words not appearing together in the same order.

    Thanks ??
    John

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by johnnyivan.
    Plugin Support Md Mazedul Islam Khan

    (@mazedulislamkhan)

    • Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Based on the information you provided, we expect this to be a bug. We’re actively using the bug tracking on our GitHub repository so your best next step would be to create a new issue for our developers at https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/new. You will need an account to create a new issue. If this is your first bug report, please check out: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/how-to-write-a-good-bug-report/.

      Don’t forget to include the URL to this conversation in your bug report.

    • Please, refer to our this video where Joost explained this exactly about the keywords.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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