Sitemap has wrong dates & posts missing

Hello @amitiel656

Thanks for reaching out regarding your sitemap. We have addressed your concerns below:

posts appear to be randomly ordered and dated

I assume you are referring to the post sitemap. Here’s a screenshot of what I currently see on my end. Posts are ordered, with the oldest appearing at the top

The Last Mod date even shows that posts that have not been edited for a good month have been modified recently

Can you provide an example post?

posts are missing in the sitemap

Share URLs of posts that should be included but missing

We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for your reply. After reactivating and deactivating Yoast SEO a couple of times, these are now fine.

However, there is another issue. For all media since the 10th of October, the og:image:alt tag is missing whenever Facebook is trying to scrape the content. This is not affecting any images uploaded before that date.

The og:image:alt re-appears when Yoast SEO is off and when the Open Graph open in Yoast SEO is turned off.

This is concerning because exactly since the 10th of October, we have a massive traffic drop. Do you maybe have any idea what could be causing this? No changes were made on the website on the 10th or before that.

Thanks in advance.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by amitiel656.

Can you provide an example of a post where the og:image:alt tag is missing when shared on Facebook?

Thanks for your reply, here are 3 posts (using link shortener) that have been published after the 9th of October and had issues:

[ Links deleted, do not use short links here again please ]

We thought initially that it might be a problem with the cache plugin (W3 Cache). We have been using the W3 Cache plugin since early September and the issue only presented itself recently. We deactivated the caching plugin yesterday and the alt tags for some of the images for the posts since the 10th reappeared. However, with the W3 Cache deactivated all posts regardless of posting date showed another error in the Facebook debugger: og:description missing

As a result, we have deactivated the OG function in Yoast SEO and have installed another plugin – all og tags are shown properly with the new plugin and there are no conflicts anymore.

Thus far we have had almost no issues with Yoast SEO, and it seems it all went downhill out of the blue. And as I mentioned – we didn’t implement anything new on the 10th of October or close to that date, so the whole situation is very baffling. Our main concern is the massive traffic drop and the inability to pinpoint exactly what caused it.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).
• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Jan Dembowski.

@amitiel656 Never, ever, ever please, use any short links in these forums again. It’s been abused in the past and the short links you posted made my AV scanner scream “BAN! THAT! USER! NOW!”

Which I am not going to do but I removed those links. Seriously, do not use URL shortners here again please.

@jdembowski Alright, thanks for the heads-up, I didn’t know that short links were banned.

@maybellyne The links from my post were deleted, so here is the post again, with the links, since I can’t edit the post:

Thanks for your reply, here are 2 posts as examples that have been published after the 9th of October and had issues:

– https://hartz4antrag.de/schockierende-neuigkeiten-fuer-millionen-deutschland-ticket-vor-dem-aus/
– https://hartz4antrag.de/finanzielle-notlage-fuer-jeden-6-deutschen-diese-hilfen-gibts-vom-staat/

We thought initially that it might be a problem with the cache plugin (W3 Cache). We have been using the W3 Cache plugin since early September and the issue only presented itself recently. We deactivated the caching plugin yesterday and the alt tags for?some?of the images for the posts since the 10th reappeared. However, with the W3 Cache deactivated all posts regardless of posting date showed another error in the Facebook debugger: og:description missing

As a result, we have deactivated the OG function in Yoast SEO and have installed another plugin – all og tags are shown properly with the new plugin and there are no conflicts anymore.

Thus far we have had almost no issues with Yoast SEO, and it seems it all went downhill out of the blue. And as I mentioned – we didn’t implement anything new on the 10th of October or close to that date, so the whole situation is very baffling. Our main concern is the massive traffic drop and the inability to pinpoint exactly what caused it.

We are unable to troubleshoot the issues with the Open Graph tags since you have turned off the feature and switched to another plugin.