Limited

  • (Premium version) This plugin offers some good (but generic) SEO tips. It also has some reasonable good functionality like sitemaps. It falls short on two things: first, it only assesses some standard fields like the long text of a page or product (I use woocommerce). So for instance it will say “there are no internal links for this product” while there are plenty but it just doesn’t see them as it doesn’t crawl. This makes it a limited product.

    Second, its redirection code frequently breaks everything woocommerce by throwing 404 errors for all woocommerce pages. When I deactivate/activate the plugin it works again. It suggests a caching problem. A very serious bug. I’ve tried reporting it to their support twice, and their support is useless. There are roughly two types of support, the ones where they genuinely try to help, and the ones where they don’t care for anything except making you go away. Yoast Support is the latter. I doubt that bug was ever reporting to the devs, and this makes them happy.

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  • Hi @webwitnl,

    Thanks for taking the time to write a review. You identified two different issues regarding the Yoast SEO plugin and we’ve addressed them below.

    It only assesses some standard fields like the long text of a page or product

    Yoast SEO analyzes the default WordPress content areas like the title, URL, the main content box (WordPress editor). If you are adding your content through other plugin or theme content boxes (as most page builders do), Yoast SEO may not be able to detect it by default. If a plugin or theme doesn’t send its content to our page analysis, its authors/developers can implement an integration feature for better SEO compatibility by following this guide.

    Its redirection code frequently breaks everything woocommerce

    We’re sorry to hear you’re experiencing problems with our plugin. We know how concerning it’s when something doesn’t work as expected and affects other parts of your site. We followed the steps in this topic you opened in the forum, but unfortunately, we couldn’t reproduce the problem in our testing environment. As you have a premium subscription, we’d appreciate it if you could contact our premium support via email. They’ll look further into the issue and help you find a solution.

    Thank you very much!

    Thread Starter webwitnl

    (@webwitnl)

    I already tried support by email.

    A quick search and audit of the code makes it obvious the bug is in the Yoast Premium redirect code, which is very badly written. Apparently it caches stuff. And for reasons unknown (incompetence?) it is very liberal in throwing 404’s about without any warning or logging when it can’t figure stuff out like a corrupt cache.

    So you keep a cache of redirects, and when it thinks it’s corrupted, it breaks the site instead of clearing the cache. It’s a very bad and lazy design choice to add a redirect layer and process all urls and then liberally throw 404’s when it can’t figure stuff out. You really can’t do that. But you do. Someone needs to look deep into the eyes of the person who wrote that.

    Thanks for the additional information, @webwitnl!

    I checked our support system and did observe that you contacted us via email regarding this issue two months ago. If you’ve contacted us on a more recent date, please let us know (I don’t seem to find any recent emails from you in our system).

    That said, I reviewed your case and suspect you’re experiencing this bug, which other users have reported several times. As you’ll see, the bug report has been open for a few years now and hasn’t been resolved yet. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to reproduce the problem on our end, which makes it very difficult for our developers to investigate it and find a solution.

    Can you please check whether the problem is specific to Yoast SEO Premium? Or, does the problem also occur with the free version of Yoast SEO (when Yoast SEO Premium is disabled)?

    If the problem occurs with the free plugin, you’re most likely affected by the bug above. We’d appreciate it if you could comment on the bug report with any information that may help our developers replicate the problem.

    If the problem only occurs with Yoast SEO Premium, you’re experiencing a different bug. In this case, please follow up with our support team via email so that they can look further into the issue.

    Thanks for your patience and sorry again for the trouble this has caused you!

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by monbauza.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by monbauza.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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