Yoast telling me the permalinks structure has changed

Hi @maslakovic

We understand the permalink structure in your WordPress site has not changed, however, the Yoast SEO message still highlighting the message. Can you please clear all your caching from your theme, plugin, server, CDN like Cloudflare or browser. If you are not sure how to clear cache from theme/plugin please speak to those authors. If you want to clear the cache from the server, please speak to your host provider. To clear the cache from a browser use this guide: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/how-to-clear-my-browsers-cache/.

We would like some more information.
– Are you using the latest WordPress version v5.5.1?
– Does the issue resolve if you use a different browser such as Chrome or FireFox?
– If you have any browser plugins/extensions, does disabling them resolve the issue?
– Temporarily disable and enable the Yoast SEO plugin

Does this resolve the issue?

Hi – I’ve cleared all cache including Cloudflare and local browser cache. Tried switching Yoast on and off before clearing the cache, and then again after. Tried Chrome in addition to Safari browser. The message is still there.

I am using the latest WordPress version – so 5.5.1. Not browser plugins/extensions – to test I did a clean install of Chrome.

The issue is still there. Is this something to be worried about? I don’t want Yoast changing my permalinks structure as that would destroy the google search rankings that I’ve been working for 5 years to attain!

Hi – I’ve also tried it on Firefox – same problem. Grateful if you could advise as its quite worrying.

@maslakovic Yoast SEO wouldn’t change the permalink structure of your site, but it sounds like something caused it to think that. Do you use any other plugins that are SEO related or have control over the permalinks, or does your theme offer any features related to changing permalinks?

Hi Carl – not to my knowledge. Yoast is the only SEO related plugin and the permalink is controlled through the general WordPress settings. I checked this and it is unchanged – so the permalink is as it has always been. This has definitely not changed in the WordPress settings. Is there any way to troubleshoot the issue – for example look in the Yoast database what/if its changing anything. The message is still there so it is doing something.

This is the full message:

– Yoast SEO creates and maintains an index of all of your site’s SEO data in order to speed up your site.
– To build your index, Yoast SEO needs to process all of your content.
– We estimate this could take a long time, due to the size of your site. As an alternative to waiting, you could:
– Wait for a week or so, until Yoast SEO automatically processes most of your content in the background. Remind me in a week.
– Run the indexation process on your server using WP CLI
– Hide this notice (everything will continue to function normally)

Just to add – the permalink structure of articles (there are 3000) of them is still the same. It has not changed. For existing or old articles.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by maslakovic.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by maslakovic.

@maslakovic Facts those you’ve highlighted above are true with Yoast SEO. Indeed, Yoast SEO creates and maintains indexing of all of your site’s SEO, builds the index, and due to the large size of your site the process runs in the background or run indexation via WP CLI are the options to do it quicker.

We understand the message being outputted it is uncommon and strange. However, since you haven’t changed the permalink structure and you’ve confirmed it for existing and old articles, the message thus seems to be false positive and shouldn’t hurt your site SEO and performance and can be ignored. We hope the current message should eventually disappear overtime after the indexing process on the background completes.

Ok, thanks. I’ll keep an eye on it.

For what it’s worth, I’m getting the same message on https://trainingmag.com. Our permalink structure has not changed. We actually ran the optimization process a couple weeks ago when we saw this error. Now the error is showing up again.

Seems like maybe there is a problem with Yoast flagging this when it shouldn’t? I know of other major websites that have reported the same problem …

Hi Eric, after my post 4 months ago it ddissapeared about a week later. Then the message reappeared again last week, stayed around for a few days then dissapeared again. The good thing is it doest change anything on the site as far as I can tell. Just ignore until it goes away.

Same here, I got this message a couple of times in the last two months

I’ve actually had it for the past month and a half now. Its surprising they do not offer a fix. Am actually thinking of installing another SEO plugin – if Yoasts changes permalink of my site it will kill my business.

I’m not sure why this post is showing “resolved” because it’s clearly not. I’ve had this error on my Yoast dashboard since at least December 20th. I’ve cleared my cache several times for other processes but the error remains. When will Yoast get this resolved?

At least in my case – the message disappeared again. It was up for about a month and a half annoying me. Luckily it didn’t seem to change anything. It’s very unnerving to see that message – Yoast should really fix this bug.

Like others, I am not sure why this is marked resolved. I worked with support for a few weeks on this back at the end of last year, and they acted as if they had never seen this issue.

Our site does the same thing everyone is describing above, a couple times a week. However this is not a benign issue as Plugin-In support indicates above, this is actually harming our SEO.

When the Permalinks changed message is present in Yoast, if you go to the site and view source without optimizing all of our SEO is populated with the IP address of the site not the site domain and URL

Everything in this section of the HTML is replaced with IP addresses instead
`<!– This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v16.3 (Yoast SEO v16.3)