Had really gone downhill — now to be avoided

  • When I first started using Yoast SEO some years ago, it was a useful, fairly easy-to-use tool that provide a lot of common-sense guidelines on improving SEO.

    Since then, the plugin has gone from bad to worse. It became harder to use (the administrative interface has been redesigned so many times I have no idea where some settings are hidden), added bloat in the form of new tools no one asked for (like a useless “readability analysis” tool that nags you for not writing technical articles at a sixth-grade level), and made some questionable privacy choices (like having an SEO blog feed dashboard widget that lets Yoast record the IP addresses of your logged-in users with no opt-out; you’ll need a custom function to turn that off).

    Since late 2019, it’s become untenable. First was the ad banner fiasco, where a plugin update automatically inserted an obnoxious marketing banner across the dashboard of every user. More recently, Yoast has started hastily rolling out major shifts in plugin functionality that are full of bugs, that try to add yet more functionality no one was asking for (like new image handling and image caching features you can’t turn off), and that try to change your workflow whether you asked for that or not. Apparently, their developers thought the changes were neat. In the long run, there might be worthwhile improvements in this mess, but for right now, they’ve made their entire user base into unwilling beta testers for their heavy-handed, controlling, badly coded nonsense.

    They also keep trying to force users into “integrations” with third-party services. These are all enabled by default, and in two of the three cases to date, I was never able to get straight answers from either Yoast or its integration partners about what data they may be collecting or where it’s going. If you’re concerned about GDPR and other privacy regulation compliance, beware.

    At this point, I cannot recommend this plugin. You definitely don’t want to run or update to version 14 or later, which is not ready for prime time and stands a good chance of breaking something on your site. Avoid Yoast SEO and find something else.

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Ate Up With Motor. Reason: fixed a run-on sentence
    • This topic was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Ate Up With Motor. Reason: The latest changes require an update
    • This topic was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Ate Up With Motor. Reason: Added a line about the refusal to support the Classic Editor
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Ate Up With Motor.
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Ate Up With Motor.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hi @ate-up-with-motor,

    Thanks for your feedback.

    We are always happy to receive comments from our users as they help us keep improving the plugin. We understand that you are not happy with the latest changes in Yoast SEO. Please, find my comments below:

    • In version 7.0 of Yoast SEO, we introduced some major UI changes which may confuse more advanced users. With this release, we tried to simplify the plugin interface and make the plugin settings more understandable to people who have less experience with SEO. You can read more about the reasoning behind the new changes on this post: https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-7-0/
    • The readability analysis in Yoast SEO helps you make your text easier to read and understand. We recommend using the readability analysis, but if you want to stop using it, you can disable it site-wide or per user by following these steps.
    • The widget you’re referring to must be provided by another plugin or your theme as the only widget generated by our plugin is the Yoast Seo Post Overview (see image) which displays the SEO score of your posts and doesn’t store any IP addresses.

    That said, we understand that there’s still room for improvement, so if you find any setting confusing or you think any feature could be implemented in a more intuitive and easy-to-use way, we’d kindly ask you to submit a feature request to our development repository. Our developers will look into it when planning updates.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    I appreciate the desire to make the settings easier to understand for novices, but the revised UI doesn’t do that, while being harder to navigate and more difficult to read.

    On the third point, the issue to which I refer is NOT created by a third-party plugin. The issue is described here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/privacy-badger-listing-yoast-as-a-potential-tracker-on-admin-page/. The TL;DR is that the plugin automatically tries to fetch something from yoast.com, which exposes logged-in users’ IP addresses to your servers, and there’s no way to turn that off or opt out.

    I find Yoast’s casual attitude toward this GDPR-implicating issue disconcerting, to put it mildly. I don’t have logged-in users other than me, but for those who do, this creates legal liability and it’s not disclosed at all. Until it’s fixed, European users with user registration should tread cautiously and make sure to include Yoast in their privacy notice list of embedded third-party content.

    As for the readability analysis, I’m glad there’s FINALLY a way to turn it off, but users suffered over THREE YEARS of mandatory (and useless) analysis without an off switch, despite quite a few people expressing frustration with it. (Given that, your team’s repeated insistence that I join GitHub before they’ll even consider addressing the privacy issue is dismaying!)

    Hi @ate-up-with-motor,

    Thanks for following up and provide additional information.

    I’ve informed the appropriate team members about the GDPR issue. They will review the information you’ve provided and take the needed action. Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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