False SEO Status Reported in Site Health

@roadsunknown We’re sorry to hear you are experiencing this incorrect warning that your site cannot be indexed or found on search engines.

Regarding Ryte, the Yoast SEO plugin does include an integration with the Ryte service that provides a courtesy indexability check. However, this is not intended as a marketing ploy. But rather it is simply meant to check for any issues on the site that would prevent it from being indexed.

If you are receiving a warning from it, we ask that you please check your site in Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool and check whether there are any indexing issue reported. This guide explains more: https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-ryte/

If the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool is able to find the site but Fetch the Current Status does not resolve the issue, then the issue is with Ryte. We suggest either ignoring it or contacting Ryte for more information as to why they are unable to find the site. We use Ryte to provide a courtesy check, however sometimes they report false positives. If you wish to contact Ryte you can do so here: https://support.ryte.com/hc/en-us.

Additionally, if you have concluded that the warning is a false positive and wish to disable the Ryte check we have instructions on how to do this here: https://yoast.com/help/disable-indexability-check/

Hi. Thank you for your detailed reply, much appreciated. Based on https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-ryte/#error, it does appear this would be a false positive and so I will disable the integration.

Personally, I would recommend not integrating with plugins that are inaccurate or scare customers into taking action with an untrusted third-party. Yoast is trusted, Ryte is not and damages your reputation. Of course, this is a business decision and I understand this request will not be considered but I think its fair to share.

@roadsunknown Thanks for your reply and I can certainly understand your sentiment.

However, we do include Ryte’s indexability check because for a lot of users it’s better that they are notified of a potential issue that would completely blocked\\ indexing, than to have their site be set to disallow it and they be unaware. For example, it’s very common to set a development site in Settings>Reading to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ when in development/staging and it’s easy to forget that setting is still on when pushing it to a live version.

Also, whereas the Ryte indexability check does on occasion throw a false positive, I will say that in a lot of cases when it does it’s typically in reference to some legitimate concern. For example, some users will occasionally implement a large number of Disallow directives (possibly even unnecessary ones) in their robots.txt file, which even when they are intentional, are in turn blocking crawling and thus indexing of some areas. So in a case like that you might see Ryte throw a warning, even though all the areas and pages that should be crawled and indexed are.

Conversely, I can also certainly understand your perspective and very much not appreciating a false positive that invokes panic and spending a half hour checking everything for noindex tags, robots.txt syntax, and permissions issue.

We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.

Hi @devnihil
I can confirm I am getting this same marketing message for Ryte. There is absolutely nothing wrong with my site being indexed by Google. In fact, everything is confirmed in my Google Search Console and I am appearing just fine on Google page 1, position 1 for many of my main keyword phrases.

To be honest, I really love Yoast and have been using the plugin for years, but I would strongly recommend cutting this marketing rubbish out of your plugin. It’s just an annoying warning message, but it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s false and appears mainly geared to generate sales for Ryte.

Thanks for your understanding ??

I got same issue in my website, why does Yoast don’t test this things before integrating it to the plugin? is giving false positives in most of my sites I got Yoast installed. Please remove integration. It is already very annoying to have to updated Yoast every 3 days so, you can publish a new notification and now we have another annoying problem with this plugin, no wonder most people are moving to Rankmath. Please learn to stop to be annoying and people would stay with you.

Yep, I get the same false positive. Its frustrating how much bloat and marketing junk that is added to the WP dashboard and system in general for a plugin that is so valuable as well. Unfortunately this is the trend by most WP plugins these days.

I just started getting the same message. This is not good and needs to be fixed ASAP.

I’ve been receiving this message too. It’s so amateur and quite embarrassing to see the lengths people go to sell something.

I was very worried and check everything that wast lot of time. misleading message for sure please update it

This issue is not resolved at all. Yoast and Ryte are using this gimmick strategy to scare their customers and collect data on the landing page of ryte. Make sure to remove this integration or don’t show false information, and trying to sell something through false positives excuse.

Just experienced the same false-positive issue from Ryte. It’s very frustrating and annoying, to say the least. Got very afraid at the beginning.

Agreed! I have the same thing and my website CAN be indexed! Is there any way to take this off the “critical issues” in site health? It’s irritating!

Unfortunate this integration still is opt-out rather than opt-in, but glad more users are reporting disappointment with this.

The reality is, Yoast very likely gets a nice payment for this integration and referrals to Ryte. And, it is a business after all so good for them, but it should be more accurate AND less misleading. Otherwise, the Yoast brand suffers an expense due to the poor user experience.

I hope Yoast is paying attention, just as @devnihil was kind to respond earlier.

Can confirm, receiving this as well. Mobile friendly check registers everything is fine, so this appears to only be a dark UX marketing ploy by Yoast. What alternatives do people suggest?