There’s a bug in your plugin

  • Resolved StanLight

    (@stanlight)


    4 years, 9 months ago

    Rank Math seems like a nice plugin but within a hour of installing it I discovered a major problem:

    Your plugin breaks my existing nofollows and makes them all dofollows!

    That’s over 50% of 5000 links on my site, which were nofollow, that have become dofollow and the only way I can restore them to nofollow is by disabling Rank Math.

    There doesn’t seem to be anywhere in Rank Math to turn this behaviour off. If I go to General Setting > Link and turn off the setting that says “Nofollow External Links” it seems to turn off ALL existing nofollows on my site.

    Sorry guys, a webmaster needs to be able to choose to have some links on his site as dofollow and others as nofollow, and that does not seem possible with Rank Math.

    So, sorry, can’t use this plugin anymore. AFAIAC, this is a bug.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Rank Math

    (@rankmath)

    Hello,

    Sorry for the issues. That is not how the plugin is supposed to handle nofollow links.

    I could not reproduce the issue on a local install. I created a regular link and a nofollow one, with both Classic editor and the new Gutenberg block editor, then installed and activated Rank Math and checked the links on the front end, and it worked correctly, the nofollow links stay nofollow. I also tried turning the “Nofollow External Links” option ON and OFF and the results were always as expected.

    If you are using a plugin to add the nofollow links/attributes then there might be some conflict between that and Rank Math.

    Please let us know the exact steps we need to take to reproduce this issue, so we can fix it in the next update.

    Thank you. Looking forward to helping you.

    Thread Starter StanLight

    (@stanlight)

    Thanks for getting back. My site is a directory site that lists local businesses. I’m using the well established Business Directory plugin (which I believe is the most used plugin when it comes to directories). I have the premium version but I believe the problem would be visible on the free version of BD as well.

    Each local business listed in my directory has several fields, like phone number, address etc. One of them is a link to their website. Across the whole directory all such links to websites of local businesses are nofollow.

    Your plugin is removing that nofollow. I tried it again and again. Simply turning off your plugin makes all my links nofollow again.

    The testing you’ve done and the behaviour you describe may apply to other links in posts and pages created in WP, I haven’t tested that, but Rank Math certainly turns all the links in my directory into dofollow.

    I didn’t post a one star review because your plugin itself does seem like a great plugin. But it’s completely useless to me given the above problem. If that is somehow solved I would definitely use it and give you a five star. I’ve had Yoast on at least half a dozen of my sites for the last 10 years or so and it’s really time for a change.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by StanLight.
    Plugin Author Rank Math

    (@rankmath)

    Hello @stanlight

    We will investigate the issue and possibly include a fix for it in a future update.

    For now, you can add the following code to the functions.php file of your theme or child theme:
    https://pastebin.com/246EUWaY

    That will disable all the functions related to the nofollow attribute in Rank Math, which should fix this issue.

    In case it’s still not working after adding the code, please share your site URL, if possible, so we can take a look at the links in question, and your site setup.

    Hope that helps. If there’s anything else, please let us know. Thank you.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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