Migrator Question

Hi Nancy,

I hoped I could get AIOSEO supported earlier, but I noticed they changed their data setup recently, so I pushed it back. I can’t recall where I implied it’s already implemented… I’m always trying to be straightforward and precise with support to prevent confusion.

In any case, until I have that ready, you can use Yoast SEO to import data from AIOSEO, whereafter you can import from Yoast SEO to TSF.

The notification may have detected records from Yoast SEO from long ago. This is a new feature, and I may want to improve that so it looks at the most recent metadata first.

Do make a backup!

As for the side note: TSF does not migrate metadata automatically. TSF generates metadata from the content, titles, excerpts, and other default WordPress metadata, which you may have encountered on a page as a placeholder entry.

You’ll know the description/titles are placeholders when you cannot select the text, and the text input cursor is always on the left, and (on most browsers) when the text becomes grey and blurry when you select the input field. I’m planning a new feature to change this behavior because it seems the art of making good placeholders is becoming arcane to many users (I get a complaint every other week) — and I don’t want to confuse TSF’s users.

Hi Sybre,

Thank-you for responding so quickly.

It is the wording that is confusing to me I thought like the links that were listed above on the migrator page seemed to be documentation to help in case you had a problem and can refer to these links.

You probably wrote it just fine, and most people would understand it right away. You can chalk it up to website inexperience.

“Migration support for “All In One SEO Pack” (AIOSEO) is underway.“

I never had Yoast, but my hosting provider would have been Yoast, but I migrated from another hosting provider and never accepted Yoast.

AIOSEO always pulled my entire post for the metadata description and I tweaked all of them to be close to 160 characters and that is why I thought I should use migrator.

I will study this again before l try migrator and select Yoast.

Thank-you for your quick response.

Nancy Dru

Hi Nancy,

That may as well have been a language barrier; I natively speak Dutch. I reworded the document just now to say, “Migration support for “All In One SEO Pack” (AIOSEO) is not available yet.”

TSF’s description generator essentially does what you had to do manually but utilizes an over-engineered algorithm: https://tsf.fyi/kb/a/65. Your procedure for editing the description explains why the old data looks like the placeholder. If the only metadata you entered with AIOSEO were the descriptions entered using the procedure you described, you might as well skip the migration.

Goedemorgen Sybre,

My friend is from BE and recommended your plugin when I was telling him about how my excerpt for meta data was pulling my entire post. I am getting tired of having to fix it every single post.

Ideally I would like to see something that reports this plugin currently works on blah, blah and AIOSEO will be coming soon. Now I see at a glance I can’t use the transporter.

I am not following what you mean the old data looks like a placeholder. Where do I see this?

I need to study this more as I am clearly inexperienced and do not understand all the settings.

Bedankt voor al je hulp.

Al het beste,

Nancy Dru

I deactivated AIOSEO and took your advice and did not use migrator. Before it was pulling my exact description I wrote, but after doing the setup I see my meta description I wrote is gone. It is a good thing I did my plan “A” and copied all my descriptions so all I need to do is copy and paste.

I have another question that is on the homepage settings. Is this what you mean by my old place holder information? I see my title correct on the Meta title, but the Meta description is wonky where it is talking about my blog description and then talks about my last blog post. If I don’t fix is this what shows up about my blog? Where would this be shown?

It is the same on the social tab. Is the general meta title and descriptions for my blog posts and the same for the social tab?

Is the grayed out verbiage an example?

It would be nice if you make a video of how to set things up. I love tutorial videos.

Vielen Dank,

Nancy Dru

Hi Nancy,

If it’s just a few pages to move over, it’s easiest to just copy and paste, yes ??

The homepage has two meta boxes because WordPress can make the homepage both a page and an archive. I recommend using the one on the SEO Settings page, where all other options reside unless you use a translation plugin. These settings affect only the homepage, not other pages. Each page should have a unique title, and preferably a unique description.

If you see a wrong description being outputted on the homepage, the theme or another plugin may interfere. If you have a link for me to inspect, I can pinpoint the issue instantly.

I do not have the time to make videos, but others did. I think this one gives an outstanding overview:

And this one is good from 20 minutes onward to set up pages (before that, it’s become a bit outdated):

SERT enabled the “Display the SEO Bar in the SEO Settings meta box?” at “SEO Settings > General Settings > Layout > SEO Bar Settings,” which he uses as a general reference point.

There are more videos, but I forgot which ones were most accurate. I can’t recall a video where the reviewer/user was blatantly wrong, so it’s quite safe to browse over them on your own time.

We also have two documentation pages covering the essentials for setup and improving pages, respectively:
https://tsf.fyi/d/setup
https://tsf.fyi/d/improve

Hallo Sybre,

Thank-you for the video links, but this one is even better and I followed it with my set-up.

Maybe ask them if you can attach the 3 videos to your installation helps, to save me and other’s time searching. ??

Here is a link to my homepage.

Nancy Dru Genealogy | Ancestry/Genealogy Blogging Website

I think I fixed it yesterday. As what I put above looks good. Is this the correct link?

I do find the gray font boxes hard to work with it. Is this what you mean that you will be fixing?

I do have a question about the meta title and meta data for a post. It is weird that AIOSEO said my title scored a 93% on my most recent post, but clearly with TSF it is more accurate and to fix it I need to adjust to have something similar as my post title in order for it to be green. Is this okay to do?

This is my actual post title:

10 Easy FamilySearch Tools That Will Save You Time

My shorter one that gets green:

Save Time with FamilySearch Tools

I will probably have to do it on quite a few, but going forward I will make it right when composing the title.

One last thing, for the excerpt it seems to always pull the first sentence. I thought with setting it to 12 it would be more AI driven and could figure that the first sentence is not the main sentence. Am I wrong in my thinking?

I am not trying to be critical and this is an improvement over my other plugin. I was just curious about AI as that is all I hear on the news lately.

Thank-you for all your help and if you ever need any help as a tester or need ancestry help let me know, as I enjoy giving back.

Best Wishes,

Nancy Dru

Hi Nancy,

That video is also outdated since we have our own migration plugin now ( https://tsf.fyi/e/transport), added oEmbed features, removed social links (unused now by search engines), taxonomy exclusions, post type archive settings, etc.

That said, the video Tech Surfer made is succinct and covers the vital parts of using the plugin ??

As for the description issue, thanks for the link! The description on your homepage shows in HTML the following:
Take the mystery out of your genealogy with helpful tips and techniques for the family ancestry sleuth.

It may appear differently on Google Search because they can alter this description. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet#meta-descriptions; I quote:

Google will sometimes use the <meta name="description"> tag from a page to generate a snippet in search results, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content.

About the greying of the input fields: I plan to make the title and description fields editable instead of only overwritable. What this entails is still to be determined.

I’m unsure what “93%” would mean in the context of anything organic. But I think you can learn a lot about what aiming for green means here: https://kb.theseoframework.com/kb/what-are-pixel-counters/.

Practically, you want to give the search engine user as much information as possible without overdoing it. Landing in “yellow” isn’t wrong, but it may result in your titles getting trimmed on some devices. Here, Google explains what makes for a good title: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link.

You already made the title much more straightforward; that’s good! If you still want the other keywords (“10” and “easy”) in the title, you could also try Save Time: 10 Easy FamilySearch Tools. Compression is an art ??

Ultimately, getting more visitors to your site and then more conversions/sales matters. These improvements ought to be inspected by Google Search Console for their efficacy (if at all), which is time-consuming. Following best practices is faster, and I’m glad you’re trying to do that ??

As for the description generator passes, setting it to 12 will make it more accurate, but doing that won’t make different content appear; it only adds spaces between accidentally glued words. See https://kb.theseoframework.com/kb/explaining-the-description-generator/#html-passes.

At the bottom of that page, under “Known difficulties,” I explain why “Generative AI” (the new AI hype from ChatGPT) isn’t suitable for meta description generation, and I wrote that before Generative AI was a thing. For the lack of better words, the non-Generative description-generation “AI” in TSF is quite complex but does that without “knowledge” of anything but your page. TSF can generate a description within a millisecond, while generative AI can take 30,000 times as long.

I hope this helps! Cheers ??

Hi Sybre,

I am sorry that I didn’t respond. I was on a mini vacation last week where the state park had limited cell and internet. For some reason I didn’t see the email alert to check out your response.

Yes, I knew the video was old, but it did the job where I wanted it to. I still have a lot to learn and I need to work on a few titles that are too long. Why does my old plug-in not follow best practices for title length? If I only knew When I made this website to keep my website address short I would be in better shape. I do like your suggestion for: Save Time: 10 Easy FamilySearch Tools

When it pulls the first sentence as my meta description, most of the time that is not as descriptive enough to me what the post is about and I will change it to what I came up with. Your plugin is still better and I hope to learn more as I go.

Thank-you for all your help.

Best Wishes,

Nancy Dru

Hi Nancy,

It’s good to be off wifi sometime; some say you’ll get a better connection.

Deep thoughts aside, I have little new knowledge to add to your comments.

AIOSEO was never a proper SEO plugin, and its founders were banking on selling out (it eventually was, by WP Beginner). Since TSF is their primary competitor, WP Beginner won’t mention us.

Writing a manual description is always better than having something generate one for you. Still, Google can (and will) ignore the custom description occasionally and supplement their own. This is why some don’t bother writing custom descriptions and wish to have at least something resembling the content provided.

Feel free to open a new topic if you have any more questions or concerns. Have a lovely day!