Too Clever for it’s own good

  • Since I upgraded to RankMath Pro a week or so ago, traffic on my previously high traffic and search engine friendly site has collapsed. The site is now dead in the water SEO wise. This has cost me several thousand dollars in lost revenue in the last week and also untold damage to my online reputation as an experienced blogger. The issue seems to be some hidden default setting that has set all of my posts and pages to no index for Google.

    I opened a support ticket with RankMath but after a few general replies in which they asked for and I gave them full admin rights and even FTP access, I have heard nothing back. In one of their earlier replies they admitted that there is some sort of bug in generating sitemaps for sites operating in GMT, but there has been no advice on how to address or fix the issue while waiting for the next upgrade. In the meantime, I am seeing RankMath clobber years of good work in building traffic and search engine standing.

    I do feel that Rankmath has great potential, but with rogue settings like this that can completely kill a site unknown to the site owner, it is too clever for it’s own good.

    Looks like I need to go back to the less glamorous but far safer and ultimately far more efficient Yoast.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • So your problem was a no index error? Anything else that happened? I don’t want to put in jeopardy my little rankings.

    Plugin Author Rank Math SEO

    (@rankmath)

    Hello @irishwhiskey

    Sorry for the issue you faced.

    The issue was fixed in the previous update and the same was mentioned in the changelog:
    Fixed: A fatal error in the Sitemap when the timezone was set to UTC-1

    We have replied to your support ticket on our website. Please let us know if you need any further assistance. We are here to help.

    Thanks for sharing your story publicly @irishwhiskey. It’s an expected outcome waiting to happen so I do not feel sorry for you. I have no doubt you produce top quality content by writting; but you are not the tech guy, you should outsource all tech tasks by hiring an experienced web developer so you can just focus on the only 1 thing u are best at – blogging.

    @supremebeing And how pray tell you would hiring additional tech support help irishwhiskey avoid a nasty bug which went out into release software? While this kind of mistake can happen, it shouldn’t. I loathe these one star reviews based on one strike and the developer is out but in this case, it seem irishwhiskey has a pretty good case for the 1 star review. That’s a lot of damage to years of hard work due to poor testing and too many releases by RankMath.

    I’m also unimpressed by RankMath’s admin area spam (submit a review or be whacked by an admin notice until eternity). It seems to be working for them with 3311 review but it’s a great way to earn one star reviews from those of us who don’t believe the back end of our WordPress sites belongs to other developers to pollute at will.

    Plugin Author Rank Math SEO

    (@rankmath)

    Hello @foliovision

    Hope you are doing well.

    Calm your horses down! This is not a place to discuss reviews.

    As far as the bug goes, that was an edge-case and no Software can EVER be bug-free.

    As much as we are sorry that it should not have been in the plugin, the best thing we could’ve done was to release an update with the fix, which we did.

    Also, we do offer a way for the users to rollback to the older version of the plugin in case any such issues arises.

    About the review notice, it seems like you missed the button to dismiss the notice. If that dismiss button is not working, then it could be a server-side cache issue on your end.

    Take care!

    Moderator Yui

    (@fierevere)

    永子

    closed

    PS: the review content and rating can still be changed by OP, if there will be a wish to do so.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Yui.
Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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