How to recover homepage description lost by plugin update

@stormymondays Can you please provide the URL for your site so we can take a look. If you can provide a screenshot of what you’re seeing, that would really help.

Thanks, I thought you’d know what we’re talking about. The first time was the one where the switch to the new style of the plugin broke everything, and you even had to issue a warning through the new Notifications feature.

The other one was discussed here:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/all-title-meta-data-and-description-meta-data-deleted-from-home-page/

This time it happened with no notification. Again across multiple sites.

I suppose the only way for me to recover the meta descriptions that disappeared from AISEO is to search for old versions of my pages in Archive.org and look at the source code.

However, it worries me that you’re not even aware of the issue.

@stormymondays I was simply asking for more information so I could help you.

The issue you’re referring to with the migration were fixed and the notice we display for very limited cases where users had set up All in One SEO in conflict to how they’d set up WordPress was there to help users so they would know to check their SEO for their homepage.

Thanks. I’ve located a few of the sites that have a broken meta description for the homepage. When editing the homepage, in the AIOSEO section, I can see this instead of my meta description:

#description

Does this correspond to some known issue?

Thanks @stormymondays. If you go to All in One SEO > Search Appearance > Advanced do you see a setting for Autogenerate Descriptions?

Also, please go to All in One SEO > Tools > Import / Export and click the Export All Settings checkbox and then click the Export Settings button and share that export file with me.

Hi @wpsmort. I don’t have a setting for Autogenerate Descriptions. I remember this setting used to exist in the old version of the plugin. I’ve checked a few of my sites and none of them have it.

I fixed three or four old sites that had that #description tag instead of the description I had crafted for the homepage. I think this one is the old bug, the one that was in the plugin alert notifications.

I’d be interested in knowing what happened with the most recent bug:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/all-title-meta-data-and-description-meta-data-deleted-from-home-page/

I did have to fix my most important sites as soon as I realized, and I forget the specifics. I think in that case the meta description was simply blank, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, it’s hard to diagnose that now, so maybe we’ll just hope that it will not happen again.

@stormymondays The Autogenerate Descriptions setting was deprecated in v4.x, but some users may see it if they had it set to Disabled in v3.x. When that happens, you will see #description where you had no set meta description.

The notice we displayed was never a bug. We displayed it because there were some edge cases where users would set a title and meta description in the General Settings of AIOSEO v3.x and then change the Use static front page instead setting which hid those two fields. They might then assume that AIOSEO was autogenerating their SEO meta for their homepage which was not the case. This is why we displayed a notice in v4.x recommending these users double check what was set on their homepage to ensure it matched what they previously set in v3.x. Again, this was a very edge case where some users inadvertently hid the Home Page Settings fields.

All reported issues with the data migration have been fixed in previous releases. We’re not aware of any open issues regarding data migration.

It’ll depend on whether your homepage is set as a static page or set to display latest posts as to where that data is migrated to.

If you have a static page then the SEO meta is migrated from the wp_postmeta table to the aioseo_posts table but we keep the old data intact so you can 1). downgrade and still have all your SEO meta there, and 2). so we can use the old data if the migration is in progress or is incomplete.

If your homepage is set to display latest posts then the data is store in the wp_options table.

It’s therefore easy enough to check if the data is the same in both places.

Thanks for the very detailed reply and investigation, I really appreciate that.