the recent update has caused major problems

  • I have no problem with this plugin changing so that you have to pay for some of its better features. The problem, however, is that those of us who have been using the full-featured free version for years updated to the newest version and discovered to our surprise that much of the functionality was missing, and articles which we had worked hard on to achieve decent SEO suddenly lost much of their optimization.

    This was most noticeable in the meta description. In the former version, there was a box where one could type in the description, and Yoast told you how many characters you had left. Now, all our meta descriptions have been removed and I believe just the first 156 characters of our articles replaced the metas we had written. To make it worse, to change the meta description now, you have to hover over a blank box which doesn’t even have a cursor in it, so you can’t see what you’re doing.

    Also, the keywords have changed. For quite some time, multiple keywords were supported in Yoast. Now it’s just one keyword and you have to pay for the functionality for multiple keywords. Sure, that’s fine, but it was sprung on us with no notice whatsoever, so now our SEO keywords are broken on all articles, posts and pages.

    Not only is it shockingly bad form to undermine all the work users have put into their websites, but if I’d been shown Yoast as it exists now back when I first decided to start using it, I would have skipped it and moved on to another SEO plugin. It’s just not very good.

    As a stopgap you can download an old version of Yoast, but no matter what, you’ll have to get a new SEO plugin soon — no one wants to risk an outdated plugin — and you’ll have to do all the work again. I’m probably going to get separate plugins for each aspect instead of one do-it-all plugin, so if one plugin becomes useless like Yoast has, I won’t lose all my work, just some of it.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • Uhm, no you don’t have to do the work all over again, thankfully. There’s a plugin here, called SEO Data Transporter to seamlessly port your Yoast SEO settings to other SEO plugins, e.g. to All In One SEO.

    Thread Starter sbbn

    (@sbbn)

    I’m not sure if you’re trying to be helpful or sarcastic, but my review is about Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO only, not other SEO plugins. But yes, I do recommend anyone using Yoast move on to another SEO at this point.

    On another forum someone mentioned the Data Transporter and there was still a lot of work to be done once it was used, so I’m not prepared to say that people won’t have to do all that work again. To my knowledge, they will.

    Hi
    I know it’s a review about yoast, but my five cents on the issue that’s been bugging a lot of people, me included:

    Meta SEO has a yoast metadata import feature and works pretty much like yoast 2.3.5
    I’ve migrated on a few dozen sites and it’s been working ok, plus it has a image metatag that’s usefull

    @sbbn I was trying to be helpful. I’ve used the Data Transporter plug-in myself and it was seamless. Although, I admit, you have to take care of the settings in All In One SEO, which you have to get used to. IMO, some standard settings are even a bit weird, but anyway, the important thing is that I kept all of my SEO titles and descriptions.

    Thread Starter sbbn

    (@sbbn)

    Thanks apessoa, I’ll check that out.

    Thanks to you as well, frizzel, and I’ll check Data Transporter out when I get around to finding a new SEO. I saw your comments to the developer on the other thread this morning — good luck!

    Final note: I did just realize after checking my webpage hits that for the days I had the new Yoast SEO, Google wasn’t indexing my website. I was getting 50% of the usual number of hits. My Alexa rank plummeted, too, but no idea if Yoast had anything to do with it.

    I totally agree with this review

    benvaassen

    (@benvaassen)

    Hi @sbbn,

    Almost a year has passed since your review. Are you still using our plugin? If not, we’ve made a ton of changes to Yoast SEO and would like to invite you to give the plugin a new try.

    If you want to learn more about the plugin before installing it, we feel our knowledge base is the best place to start.

    Thanks!

    Thread Starter sbbn

    (@sbbn)

    Hi Ben — I’m planning on trying it again when I open my new website in a month or so.

    However, on my current main website, any time I update to the new Yoast, my hits and Google rankings drop by about 40% to 50%. (I last tried in mid October so it’s a recent problem.) Since that’s a website I probably won’t have much longer, I think I’ll pass on upgrading Yoast there. I would assume that, once upgrading to the new Yoast, the SEO would improve after a few weeks, or maybe after I review each post to fix the settings to work with the new version, but I don’t really have time for that.

    Thanks for your reply. I’ll keep this review in mind and update/change after using it on the new website, but it’ll be a few months before I know how it works.

    benvaassen

    (@benvaassen)

    Hi @sbbn,

    Thank you for your reply and for not giving up on us! If you run into any trouble, just let us know.

    Thanks a lot!

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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