301 redirect missing?

You can see in the changelog that we’ve removed this option.

??
it was very useful feature.
This option moved to Premium version or removed permanently?

Really?
Why have you removed this feature?
Will all currently activated redirects be intact?

I always advise my customers to use this redirect option and it would be really horrible to find ALL redirects and correct them!

What a strange move from Yoast to remove it without giving other options!
What do you advise?
Best regards,
Bart

so what alternative option now, use htaccess, but then i have quite a few and will need to find them.

It is now a pro feature ??

Great so i assume pages set with 301 through this plugin will now show as duplicate content as the 301 will fail to work

Any quick way to find out what pages i have 301 set on, then i can update htaccess before updating plugin.

@tacoverdo – ultimately I did find a reference to it buried in the changelog, but it was not in the “What’s New in 2.3” that the plugin aggressively presents to users.

I’ll confess that I find this change a little poorly documented. Also, I’ve marked this topic unresolved as your answer only creates more questions (for which I’ve been unable to find any info in the documentation.)

For now, we won’t be updating the plugin on most of the sites my team & I administer because I don’t know:

• What happens to existing 301 redirects when the plugin is upgraded?
• Where can I find all of the posts for which we’ve previously used this feature? (I didn’t bother to keep track!)
• How can I find out about major changes like this in the future before running an update? I need to be able to plan for loss of critical functionality and understand the implications.

Look… you guys are well respected and produce fine software. I don’t mean this post to sound terse, nor do I intend to come across as ungrateful for the work you guys do. It’s just that my confidence is a little shaken after this incident.

Thanks for your help.

This seems very lame from Yoast

I personally think it poor a seo plugin pulling a feature such as a 301 redirect. Some sites may have 1000s of these set.
Wish i had used the htaccess redirect now and not relied on a plugin.
Just hoping they are left intact with any upgrade.

Interesting… My first comment seems to have vaporized.

I find this to be in very bad form. No warning on a change that will cause the community that doesn’t want or maybe can’t purchase the pro version to get this back. The simple fact that you have essentially taken a feature many of us are dependant upon as hostage until we pay $69. I will be looking for a new plugin. Thanks for the years that this plugin was helpful.

Personally, I have a copy of the previous version and pushed this back to the server. The redirects reappeared so at least they weren’t removed from the database during the upgrade.

Is it possible to copy the function from 2.2 to 2.3 manually?

@hallmarc so if they are left on server, does this mean they still function as redirects after upgrade? This i can live with and implement future 301s via my htaccess

What worries me is what will be moved to pro version in future updates? maybe time to change

@mrppp I didn’t check if they where still redirecting after the feature was removed. Sorry.

@mrppp Glad you asked that question. I ran the updater again and then checked my redirect pages – they are not only still redirecting BUT I still see the 301 redirect field. This field seems to only appear only pages that already had it set prior to the update. All others do not have the 301 field showing.

Secondly, I looked at the Details screen where we can read about the changes in v 2.3 it does say that this feature has been removed/moved to premium. So we were given warning.

Just to clarify, redirects still work and are still visible editable if they were created before the 2.3 upgrade.

I have one other site to test these findings on and will post if I find anything different.

Yes, we have prevented you from adding new 301 redirects in the advanced tab of the Yoast SEO meta box. And there are a couple of very good reasons for that.

You’ve already mentioned the first yourself. It is virtually impossible to keep track of what post is redirected where. You’ll have to open each post or visit each URL to find out. That’s causing quite a mess over time.

Our Premium customers, who have access to a far better redirects-module, often ran into posts that were redirected while no redirect was set in the redirects-module. Having to manage redirects in a couple of different locations really is undoable.

Checking for the set 301 redirect also requires us to do an extra query on every pageload. Which means we had to slow your website down a bit, just to check if there was a redirect set. Since speed is gaining importance as a ranking factor, we are constantly looking how we can further optimize our plugin.

However, as said, we’re not yet removing the entire functionality. All your redirects will still work. Your website will not be impacted in any way, we only stopped you from adding more redirects this way.

Your redirects aren’t lost. They’re safely stored in your database and if you decide to switch to Yoast SEO Premium, all of them will be automatically important in the redirects-module.

And if you’re worried we’re going to slowly move the whole plugin to premium, have you seen that we just moved the complete Google Search Console integration to the free plugin?

So don’t worry. We’re here to stay and we want you to be able to do SEO for your WordPress website in the best way possible.