WordPress SEO 1.2 – Major Upgrade

12 June 2012 | 369 Comments | Tags Software releases and updates, WordPress, Yoast SEO | By Joost de Valk

My WordPress SEO plugin has been updated to 1.2. A few weeks back I did a series of bug fix updates and while doing that I noticed there where things that were really bugging me in the plugin. Everybody seemed to focus on the settings and hardly anyone was working with the snippet preview and the page analysis functionality, in my opinion the most important pieces of the plugin. This update will try and gently push you to use that functionality more.

Next to that, I also did a major overhaul of the two most important settings pages, so let’s discuss these changes first:

The new SEO settings pages

The plugin used to have a “Titles” and an “Indexing” page. That was confusing as the titles page also covered the meta descriptions and had pieces for each (custom) post type and (custom) taxonomy and the Indexing page had other settings for these same post types and taxonomies. So I decided to merge them into one and divide them into tabs for the separate sections.

These sections now look as follows:

And the section for post types:

As you can see, they’re much cleaner. Both post types and taxonomies can now be noindex, followed straight from this interface as well, with the option to override the global setting on a per post or per term (eg. a tag or category) basis.

Rel=”author”

As I mentioned in my previous post about rel=”author” through your head, this feature is now in WordPress SEO 1.2. Simply go to your author profile and fill your Google+ URL and it’ll be added to each post automagically.

Default Settings

The WordPress SEO plugin until now always lacked proper default settings. It had them but it didn’t show them to the user in the titles section and it didn’t have them for various other sections. While there’s still more work to do with guiding people to get the right settings, the plugin now sets defaults that should work well for 99% of sites on install.

This also means the plugin, when freshly installed, will now automatically enable XML Sitemaps and will detect automatically whether force rewrite needs to be enabled or not. That should save me some support headaches.

But, as I said, those sections aren’t really that important. This bit is:

The Snippet Preview & Focus keyword

An enormous amount of bugs have been fixed in the snippet preview and the focus keyword functionality. Most of them are related to non-ascii characters and languages such as Russian and Arabian, but others involve keywords with dollar signs or even simple dashes. “In-company SEO training” for instance will now be properly recognized as a focus keyword.

The bolding of keywords in the snippet preview has also been fixed for all cases I knew went wrong. If you still have issues, be sure to let me know through the forums; but I fully expect this release to fix most of them.

The Page Analysis functionality

When I introduced this functionality in May 2011 I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, but as I said, I couldn’t get enough people to use it properly. Linkdex, who contributed the original code, always calculated a “score” for each page based on that code and I had decided to not use that score. The reason I left it out was simple: I didn’t want people to optimize for that last percent.

For this release, I decided it was time to re-think that approach and come up with something better. Now, each post, page or other post type will get a “score”, but there are only 4 options:

bad (red)
poor (orange)
ok (yellow)
good (green)

They look as follows:

This score is shown inside the publish box:

But, more importantly, it’s also shown in the overview of posts and pages, alongside other key SEO info (click for large version):

As you can see, you can show the SEO score, the focus keyword, the meta description and the title; and you have the ability to sort by the first three of those values. This makes it easy to find posts that don’t have a focus keyword or have a low SEO score. You can also easily disable those columns that you’d rather not see. Within the posts overview, there are two colors for posts that aren’t a score. Grey means the post has no focus keyword and thus no score; blue means the post is set to noindex, so the score doesn’t matter.

Questions and Answers about this release

Why is this 1.2 and not 2.0?
I’ve decided my WordPress SEO plugin will follow the same version numbering as WordPress, so each point release is a major version increase. This prevents version number inflation so we don’t have WordPress SEO 25 in 4-5 years time.
Will all my settings be saved when I upgrade?
Yes. But it won’t hurt you to go through all your settings and check whether you’re still doing what’s best for you. It won’t force the new defaults on you if you’ve already got the plugin installed, but there’s a button you can push if you want it to.
Does this version do X?
It might. Why not download it and see for yourself? If it doesn’t, open a thread in the forums and let’s talk about it. Be warned though, I refuse most feature requests.
You removed the setting for X, how can I change that now?
First of all, I tend to remove stuff for a good reason. Think about why I did that and see if you really need to change it. If you do, there’s a good chance the WordPress SEO API, which has a ton of actions and filters added in this release, will allow you to change it programmatically.

That’s it! Go and play with it and let me know what you think about this upgrade in the comments!

Joost de Valk

Joost is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Yoast. He has a long history in WordPress and digital marketing. On our blog, he has written a lot about SEO in general, technical SEO and important topics related to SEO.

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369 Responses to WordPress SEO 1.2 – Major Upgrade

Chellie Cervone • 12 years ago

Hi Yoast – my categories are not working right, I have the base stripped so I make sure that after I do anyway that I update the permalinks. I want to try the development person and I’m having issues doing it.

What the dumbed down version. Should I drop it in via FTP and remove the old one at the same time, or leave them both there or something else totally. TX. PS I love the plug in. I am pretty new at this and I think I’m doing OK in part because of the plug-in :)
Jasjot Bains • 12 years ago

Hi Joost
2 problems
1. As far as the code for breadcrumbs is concerned, WHERE in my site do I put that code?
2. I tried %%title%% | %%sitename%% to display the name as title | sitename, but however it only displays the title and not the sitename. Keeping it on the default setting is making it show as sitename | title
vince • 12 years ago

Hi, how can i disable showing post date in the snippet view?

I could do this in the old version, but this one, how?

thanks

vince
Cyp • 12 years ago

Hi Joost,

Firstly, thank you for an awesome plugin.

How do I change the title and meta description on paginated posts?

If I break a long post into 3 pages () i.e

example/3/
example/2/
example/

WordPress will display the same title and description across all pages and Google will penalize the website for duplicate content.

The new version can solve this problem ?

Thank you.
Harvey • 12 years ago

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but…

I am new to the Yoast SEO Plugin. I just starting using it a few days before the new version was released. (I also recently moved my site to WordPress.)

My site is about outdoor adventure (skiing mostly) and I’m not think about the keyword/phrase for each post when I plan my outdoor adventures. I recently took a hike that had two primary keyphrases that could describe it, and I split the hike into two posts – one per keyphrase – and both were “green” easily. All my post are now green even before I add alt tags and do the tweaking.

The point I am trying to make – this plugin TEACHES SEO. It has changed the way I write for the better for both search engines and humans. I dig it. Thanks!
- Harvey • 12 years ago
  
  Oops, should read “I’m NOW thinking about the keyword…”
Randi Thornton • 12 years ago

Hello: I have the plugin installed on a wp multi-site. The canonical tag is….

which is the sub-domain for a site, but the site redirects to http://firststoragemnn.com. How do I change the canonical to reflect this instead of the sub-domain? Thanks… Love the plugin!
Jasjot Bains • 12 years ago

Hi Yoast
In the page analysis, there is a mention of outbound links. How many outbound links do you recommend a post must have? And with how many outbounds will the dot stay green?
Andy Fox • 12 years ago

Hey Joost,

Firstly, thank you for an awesome plugin.

I’ve searched for a problem I’m having and couldn’t find an answer. I get this warning on my posts after the latest upgrade:

Warning:Division by zero in /home/thefoxga/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/admin/class-metabox.php on line 1538

It doesn’t seem to effect my posts, unless I try to put alternate text behind images. Any idea what it could be?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hmm might have just found that bug. Could you try the development version? You can download the development version from here, or you can download it directly here.
  - Andy Fox • 12 years ago
    
    I tried that Joost, sorry, should have said that.
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      Try it again, I committed an update about 15 minutes ago.
      
      Andy Fox • 12 years ago
      
      It still didn’t work Joost. I really appreciate you getting back to me though and trying to iron out the bugs.
      
      I’ll be sticking with this great plugin. I’ll just leave out the alt image text for the moment and wait for upgrades.
      
      Thanks!
kamal • 12 years ago

Hi,

Since the upgrade, I’m getting 404 Error for all my categories. What can we do about this ?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Are you on 1.2.5 yet? If you are and it’s still happening, please switch to the development version and report if it’s fixed. You can download the development version from here, or you can download it directly here.
  - kamal • 12 years ago
    
    Yes, I was. And even after using the developer version, it is still not working. I’m pretty confused right now and don’t know what to do. Even after deleting the plugin files, nothing seems like working. Please help
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      Are you running a caching plugin? If so: did you clear it? And did you clear your browser cache?
      
      kamal • 12 years ago
      
      I’m not using any cach pluging.
      
      and just we are so clear. Before the update, my categories used to look like this http://www.site.com/name-of-category
      
      after the update, it looks like this : http://www.site.com/category/name-of-category.
      
      So, when I go to SEO>Permlinks – I took off the option of keeping the/category, I hit update, and then, both of http://www.site.com/name-of-category and http://www.site.com/category/name-of-category are returning 404 Errors.
      
      I’m sorry for bothering you.
Bunty Gurung • 12 years ago

Hi Joost, this is my first time writing to you so am a little excited. I am not here to complain or whine about anything related to the plugin, If I need that I will ask it in the wp support forums. I am here just to give you a ‘big thank you’ for such a comprehensive plugin. My respect for you multiplied when I saw your responses in wordpress support forums, that almost each and every thread has received your personal response. God knows how you make time for that. I wish every free plugin developer had such dedication.

I could not resist using your plugin on of my business sites this time when I had an overview of the new features and I sure am glad I did that. In fact I never knew that switching from another plugin would be such a breeze. Simply awesome.

You are doing a great service to people and there is no higher purpose of life. God bless you, Joost.
Scott • 12 years ago

Any tips on how to troubleshoot the XML parsing error, where a blank line is added before the XML declaration? I’ve noticed a number of people posting about this issue, but have not seen any solutions.

I’ve disabled all plug-ins, and checked all functions files for any empty spaces in the PHP, but still have this error. If it’s not in your plug-in and all other plug-ins are disabled – Is there a way to track what PHP has run just before the XML sitemap is created?
Denis • 12 years ago

Hi,

Since the update 1.2.5 I get a 404 error message when I switch to the category.

Denis
Chellie Cervone • 12 years ago

I have to keep toggling the strip category base and it would soon thereafter mess up so I turned it off. Can one of you “smarties” tell me if this will mess up the structure of my site as far as SEO
Michael Davidson • 12 years ago

When updating, the Webmaster Tools values disappear. I thought at first it was just the site I was on, but every site I’ve updated so far, these values disappear. I didn’t hit Reset Default Settings (which even if I did, it would be nice if those values remained). I know they may not be needed once you are verified, but it’s nice to see there to know I’ve done it.
Chellie Cervone • 12 years ago

Hey I spoke too soon. The toggling on and off worked for a bit and now all my categories and tags are not working again. Your plug in is really helping me learn SEO (I’m a newbie)and I am frustrated.

I am disabling the plug-in which I I really hate to do.

Any suggestions?
Chellie Cervone • 12 years ago

I use the snippet preview and page analysis faithfully! When I upgraded, thed categories stopped working so I unchecked strip category base, saved it, rechecked it and all is well.

I’m upgrading my other sites and was wondering if you have some recommendations as to what to check after upgrading to make sure the seo plugin is working. Tx
Karl • 12 years ago

Hi there, just updated to 1.2.4 and am running into an issue with the breadcrumb function on single.php templates. When activated, it’s giving me a memory exhaustion error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 88 bytes) in /../wp-includes/cache.php on line 406

If I disable the breadcrumb feature in the admin, or remove the code from the template, all works fine.

Previously had WP 3.3.2, after WP SEO update, I updated WP to 3.4.1, but still gives cache error.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  You’re lacking a tiny bit of memory it seems; to be honest it looks like you have a lot of plugins running, correct?
  - Karl • 12 years ago
    
    Thanks for the reply Joost! We have about 15 plugins active for this site at the moment (and another 10 inactive), including WPML, as we’re developing the site and testing various things.
    
    Just seemed a bit odd that it was working fine beforehand and only caused a problem with upgrading to 1.2.4. I’ve not tried to update any of our other sites yet, so not sure if we’d have the same problem.
    
    Anyway, probably more due to other plugins and our server specs, but wanted to mention it, in case other people ran into the same problem or it might have been a bug.
Ronald • 12 years ago

Nice update Yoast! Is there any ETA on video site map plugin?
Norbert Woehnl • 12 years ago

Hi Joost, again great progress with 1.2.4, thank you.

The one issue that I still continue to receive (and that made me switch back to 1.1.9, which was the last version without this challenge) is the error in the sitemap, which a couple of other folks also seem to have reported over in the WP support forum:

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity Location: http://www.norbertwoehnl.com/de/page-sitemap.xml Line Number 48, Column 21: Straßenszenen aus Japan -----------------------------------------^

Cheers –
Norbert
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Ehm I don’t see that error when I go to that sitemap? :) Cache issue?
  - Norbert Woehnl • 12 years ago
    
    Hi Joost – you should be able to see it now, I switched to 1.2.4 again …
Jasmine • 12 years ago

Hi there, what’s the code to rewrite the titles? I’ve tried to check the force rewrite as well as uncheck it, but it’s not working properly. I’d rather just edit the theme file but I don’t know what the code is.
Jasjotbains • 12 years ago

Hey Yoast
Having a small problem. Whenever I click on Titles and Meta, the tabs appear but everything else freezes. I changed over to twenty eleven, all works well. However whenever I change over to some other theme (tried Mantra,Thesis and Arras) the problem restarts. When I view source I can see HTML was rendered properly but clicking on tabs doesn’t do anything.
Some JS issue maybe?
Kester • 12 years ago

Hey yoast,

please give an example on how to use the wpseo_xml_sitemap_img_src function to set the CDN source for images.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Added it to the end of the API docs page.
  - Kester • 12 years ago
    
    Thanks! Much appreciated.
Dwight Zahringer • 12 years ago

Awesome update – was wanting Custom taxonomy support and now we have it. Had a few issues but your support here in the comments has taken care of it. Good work – keep it up!
Callum • 12 years ago

I’ve been using this pugin for over six months and have just started to have problems with my sitemap in webmaster tools.

Google says there is a parsing error,

We were unable to read your Sitemap. It may contain an entry we are unable to recognize. Please validate your Sitemap before resubmitting.

I have resubmitted but still have the problem, Google points to the following sitemap url having a problem
http://blog.pre-pay-as-you-go.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml

Please can you advise?
- Callum • 12 years ago
  
  Since I posted the above I decided to disable the xml sitemaps section of yoast and now everything seems fine, apart from now the keywords section of yoast for adding keywords to a post has gone!
  
  What could have caused this?
Richard • 12 years ago

We used to be able to remove the date from the Meta Description (it is removed from my template) and Google correctly leaves it out as well. I see you’ve removed the ability to hide the Date. Why? Can you put this back in as many people choose to hide the date in the meta description.
- Richard • 12 years ago
  
  Any feedback as to why this was removed? Didn’t seem to be affecting anyone negatively and it helped with maximizing the value of the meta description.
  
  Two second response is all I’m asking for. Thanks Joost!
  - ^ Post author
    Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
    
    It wasn’t :-) it just moved to the API, as it was giving me support headaches.
    - Richard • 12 years ago
      
      Actually, I was thinking that might be the reason. I wished people realized that they have to modify their own theme to have the date actually removed. Maybe reconsider putting the option back in with a hint beside the checkbox stating the above?
      
      Regardless, this is the best SEO plugin there is. I’ll be donating shortly.
Tirupati Darshan • 12 years ago

I have been using the yoast plugin from last 7days, hope it works to me, the another thing is when click the wordpress tags, the title of post shows starting with TAG ARCHIIEVE, Could any tell me, How could i rid of it in title of every wordpress tag?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Go to SEO -> Titles & metas and change it, you’ve probably set it like that yourself.
Dede • 12 years ago

Very good for this plugin. I has helped us tremendously in getting our site running correctly and getting our content perfect at least the content that we have control over being we are site that publishes poets poetry and artist artwork. Thank you.
Jasjotbains • 12 years ago

Hi Yoast
The “Titles and Meta” part of the plugin just freezes !! It just displays the 6 tabs and nothing else ! Clicking on any tab does not make a difference. The rest of the tabs in settings like import export etc are all working fine.
- Nicky • 12 years ago
  
  This is exactly what is happening to me. Do you also have the All in One Calendar?
  - Jasjotbains • 12 years ago
    
    Ummm no, but I have W3TC..disabled that too, but still no effect. I hope you not having problem tracking your site in analytics too?
Nicky • 12 years ago

Hi,
I posted last night but apparently my comment is still in your moderation queue! I did confirm my email. Anyway I have found that with the latest upgrade this plugin (1.2) seems to now conflict with All in One Calendar, in that none of the meta and titles pages are accessible. There was no problem before. I use All in one as a main part of my site for our events so it is not practicable to disable it. Can you help? I noticed someone else had this issue, as I saw it in the forums. I have not upgraded to 1.2.3 as with the comments above i am scared of getting even more conflicts. Thanks for any advice.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  They will have to fix their plugin, it outputs JavaScript on admin pages that are not related to their plugin… Common mistake and quite easy to fix.
  - Nicky • 12 years ago
    
    Thanks – have contacted the developer. There are a lot of other people with this issue.
Mike • 12 years ago

Joost, is there a tutorial on how to set it up properly?

Thanks!
Sue Surdam • 12 years ago

Hmm…somewhere along the upgrade process the use Meta keywords tag became unchecked. I rechecked the box but all my customization of meta keywords in the plugin Titles and Metas section was gone. Lucky for me it didn’t affect any of the posts I had customized.

I know that most SEO experts don’t put much stock in meta keywords, but it seems strange that the plugin update stripped that section. This happened on all of the sites I work with (many sites, using a variety of themes.)
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  How did you upgrade?
  - Sue Surdam • 12 years ago
    
    I upgraded each site individually from their WP dashboard.
    - Sue Surdam • 12 years ago
      
      Just wanted to let folks know that if your meta tags have disappeared after the update. Before your start adding new tags – export a copy of your current settings using the plugin export feature. Open that with notepad and you will see the tag meta keywords in that doc. Then you can copy them. Note: I did try importing that doc but it didn’t fill the meta tag sections.
Frank Motola • 12 years ago

We have used your SEO for all of our blog pages which are many. The blog is on the same server as the core site and they are interconnected. Our thought was to create lots of interesting relevant content and it would be added to our total content. In turn this would raise the rankings of the core site. This doesn’t seem to be happening even after a year and many pages added to the blog at http://www.CTSweep.com/blog – Can’t figure this out. The strategy has been used on 2 other clients with equally disappointing results. Nothing to do with your software, but wondering if our method is faulty from your point of view. Thanks
Frank Motola • 12 years ago

Built a site a couple months ago and loved using the old plug in to handle the SEO, but something odd is happening. Even though all my pages are indexed according to webmaster tools, if I search the name of the product which is all over the site we only come up in position 6. The name is the domain – SaffroLean – So, tweets and FB comes up ahead of us. Does our lack of Page Authority keep us there because this is a new domain or are we missing something???
Ian Davies • 12 years ago

I’m new to the plugin. I’ve been using ‘All In One SEO Pack’ since I started my site and had excellent rankings… until recently and I’m keen to stop the slide, which is why I’ve moved over to Yoast.

I like what I’ve seen so far, but one thing is puzzling me. On a couple of important pages, I’m getting a ‘red’ score because, quote, “There are 23 words contained in the body copy..” when there are over 300.

I’m keen to know why this happens and how it can be resolved.

I’ve seen a number of people ask about this on different forums, but I can’t find an answer.

Ian D
- Ian Davies • 12 years ago
  
  Anyone have a comment regarding my ‘word count’ issue detailed above?
  
  Thanks.
  - ^ Post author
    Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
    
    Do you use shortcodes that wrap the entire content?
    - Ian Davies • 12 years ago
      
      Thnaks for your reply, Joost.
      
      No, I don’t.
      
      The message doesn’t occur on every page, but in one instance it stated I only had 45 words when there were over 1,000.
      
      Anything else I should try or you feel I’m doing wrong?
      
      Oh, I’m using Canvas from WooThemes if that’s important?
      
      Thanks again.
      
      Ian Davies • 12 years ago
      
      Anything else I should be looking for, Joost?
      
      Thanks.
      
      Ian D
Kester • 12 years ago

One problem I notice, but may not be the fault of this plugin:

With the Self-hosted CDN option enabled on W3 Total Cache, the image urls get changed from domain.com/images/file.jpg to cdn.domain.com/file.jpg which is nice for large sites since we get to serve static files cookieless and on a separate subdomain.

The Sitemap in WordPress SEO still points to the domain.com/images/file.jpg URLs. It would be nice if these were pointed to the CDN copy, since that’s being used in the post content.
John John • 12 years ago

Hi,
Since last update, I got memory errors with 1&1 hosting.
Everything works fine on GoDaddy, but 1&1 does not allow more than 32MB memory limit.
Too bad that the plugin have to use so much memory now, can’t use “Titles & Metas” page anymore.
Thank you.
Lou • 12 years ago

Hi Joost, Thank you for the great plugin and great plugin update. I would like to change the settings in my Theme (Socrates) so I do not have to use Force Rewrite Titles. There does not seem to be a link to your instructions/article on how to change the settings. I have searched on your site for the instructions/article but can’t seem to find it, could you please direct me to it. Thank you!
- Chris Olbekson • 12 years ago
  
  Lou,
  The reason why some themes require you to force the rewrite of titles is because the theme is either not using the wp_title() function or using it improperly. To correct this you will need to manually make changes to your header.php file.
  
  Look for the title tag and change it to:
  - Chris Olbekson • 12 years ago
    
    Code sample was stripped out of previous comment.
    
    Remove everything between the opening and closing title tags and replace it with open php tag wp_title(); close php tag.
    
    See the codex for more info: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_title
    - Lou • 12 years ago
      
      Thanks Chris,
      Just to make sure I have this correct; in the header.php file I would delete the following: , and I would replace it with:
      
      Is that correct?
      Thanks again
      
      Lou • 12 years ago
      
      Code sample was stripped out of previous comment too.
Shafie • 12 years ago

Hi,
I have checked exclude tag from sitemp, but I want to include a selected tags, I have choosen “always include” in combobox within tags that I want to include in the sitemap, but still does not appear in the sitemap.

Any clue?
chat • 12 years ago

Thank you for useful information, I wish you good work.
justin kofron • 12 years ago

your seo blogs are a good resource,especially for WordPress. I would love for you to talk about Magento more. Check out my Magento site. http://bit.ly/LDzQLw . Do you have any thoughts on consumer shopping engines?
Denis • 12 years ago

Hi,

Since the new plugin update most of the Titles were rewritten. I label the title itself and individually, and since the update has some overridden. The title option to force overwrite is disabled. Is this a bug in the plugin?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hi Denis,
  
  I don’t really get what you’re saying, which titles no longer work? Feel free to check the “force rewrite” box if that works better for you…
  - Denis • 12 years ago
    
    However, the title work but I think they are overwritten. I describe the posts in the SEO box itself and this will no longer be accepted.
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      Show me an example, I still don’t really get what you mean :)
      
      Denis • 12 years ago
      
      Can I send you by e-mail screen?
Jessica Brant • 12 years ago

Joost,

Thanks so much for this plugin. I has helped us tremendously in getting our site running correctly and getting our content perfect at least the content that we have control over being we are site that publishes poets poetry and artist artwork

We do have a challenge and its not with your plugin per say it is a general question about meeting Googles requirements with the following

1. Body Copy (red) Most of the time
We tend not to meet because our posts are mainly poems written by unknown poets and their works ars often way below the 300 word recommended minimum.

2: Keyword in the first paragraph (red) Most of the time
With Poetry placing the keyword in the first paragraph of the copy nearly never happens.

3. Outbound Links (Yellow) Always
Placing outbound links on the page, are never appropriate because we again deal with poets and their bodies of works and it is not our place to place outbound links with in their bodies of work.

4: Page title contains (Yellow) Always
is often less then the 40 characters because the post titles are offen just the name of the poem and the poets name. We can’t change the integrity of the piece that has been given to us to publish just to meet Googles set guides.

5: Flash Reading Ease (Yellow) Most of the Time.
It is Poetry need I say more….

We have played with the Focus Keywords to improve the seo and for the most part this is the typical feed back we get from your plugin
we get SEO Yellow light because of the above mentioned

Your focus keyword was found in:
Article Heading: Yes (1)
Page title: Yes (1)
Page URL: Yes (1)
Content: Yes (1)
Meta description: Yes (1)

Yet we still get the yellow or red seo light : (
Is there any way to get exempt from the google police for content we have little to no control over ?

Jessica
Karl • 12 years ago

After updating the plugin recently and unticking “force rewrite titles” (as I wanted to have a custom setup), I just noticed that the frontpage was showing this as a title:

This is a Yoast Test Title

Which wasn’t so sexy! Searching Google, it seems like it’s something that has been indexed for a couple of hundred pages.

If I ticked force rewrite titles, saved, unticked it and saved again, the problem seems to go away and it’s showing my titles as I expect they would be shown.

Not sure what the function “title_test_helper” is meant to do? Or if the above is a bug?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  It is a bug, switching your theme back and forth should fix it, but it’s weird that it happens.
Leigh • 12 years ago

Hi Joost, I’ve updated to the lastest version 1.2.3 but I’m still having the same issues: sitemap pages are going to a 404 not found page, and my RSS feed still displays an error as follows:

XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: http://feeds.irishcelticjewels.com/IrishCelticJewelsBlog
Line Number 3, Column 1:
^
Have you any recommendations on how I might resolve this issue?

Thanks,

Leigh
Kieler • 12 years ago

Hi there, Yoast,
a great plugin, I am using it for months now and I am completely happy. One thing though disappeared, and I don´t know why: Switching off the date in the snippet. I am quite sure it used to be an option of your plugin and I turned it off because I want to have the extra characters in the snippet. Since upgrading to 1.2, I don´t have this option anymore and google starts to show the publishing date in the search engine results. Anything that I missed? Am I completely wrong?
Thanks, cheers,
Jörn
scott • 12 years ago

Just updated to 1.2.3 and still getting the “XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity” error. If you could point me to the file that generates the sitemap file, I could try and find that whitespace.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  It’s not in the plugin itself, but probably in your themes functions.php or *another* plugin…
  - scott • 12 years ago
    
    I disabled plug-ins and still didn’t find the culprit. I also checked the theme functions and other files for issues, but didn’t find any. I disabled Yoast-seo, then uploaded the development version and enabled that. The first time I clicked to see the XML sitemap I got a 404 page. So I clicked to save settings on the XML page, and tried again, and was then back to the XML parsing error. The file it lists has having the error is wordpress-seo/css/xml-sitemap-xsl.php
    - Hans • 12 years ago
      
      Go to plugins/wordpress-seo/css/xml-sitemap-xsl.php
      and delete the blank space in the line after this code:
      echo '';
      this worked at my blog
      
      Hans from Bavaria
      
      scott • 12 years ago
      
      Really strange, when I deleted that blank space
      in Dreamweaver, I then got a syntax error showing
      up on line 155, which is javascript. Also, this
      didn’t help my sitemap issue!
Jas • 12 years ago

Same problem as sugar is facing. Since updating to 1.2.3, the post freezes while loading in the admin area,i.e, the text and the window all go white, leaving a blank window. You have to drag-select the text.
sugar • 12 years ago

Serious conflict with W3 Total cache plugin after upgrade to 1.2.3

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-blog-post-is-disappearing-when-plug-in-is-activated?replies=2#post-2910739
Sherie • 12 years ago

Thank you for your awesome plugin! I seem to have to have lost the ability to see the number of pageviews per post since I updated…how do I get that back (I am a total newbie, here)?
Jojo • 12 years ago

Hi Joost,

updated to the new version. Now hyphens are deleted from the title-Tags, e.g. here would “Wlan-Probleme” show as “WlanProbleme”. It´s only happening in the title-Tag. H1, etc. are showing it correctly.

For a quick fix I commented line 12 in class-frontend.php out. So it is now showing correctly.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  That deletes the entire filter and isn’t really helpful :) what was the exact title?
  - Jojo • 12 years ago
    
    The new version (1.2.5) fixed that problem.
  - Jojo • 12 years ago
    
    I know. I took it out, so you can see it now. It happens on all posts with a hyphen: “HTC bestätigt Wlan-Probleme des HTC One X” is now “HTC bestätigt WlanProbleme des HTC One X”.
Leigh • 12 years ago

When I click on my sitemap pages, I’m getting a 404 page not found error page. Also, there’s a problem with my RSS feed. It’s displaying this error:

XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: http://feeds.irishcelticjewels.com/IrishCelticJewelsBlog
Line Number 3, Column 1:
^

Any advise?

Thanks,
scott • 12 years ago

When I click to see my XML sitemap, I get this error: “XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: http://bitterharvest.ca/sitemap_index.xml
Line Number 2, Column 1:”

I don’t use any caching plug-ins or anything – so what would cause this?
Angus • 12 years ago

Ok, my Titles & Metas panel still won’t expand although it worked perfectly before the update, and I’ve disabled each plugin for testing (twice) and cleared the browser cache (multiple times), etc. I need the keyword box on the posts/pages to use in conjunction with another plugin. Is there a way to opt for it to show by changing something in the css?
Paul Hoff • 12 years ago

Hi, just updated and tried to uncheck the ‘Use meta keywords tag?’ but when i save, it’s back in there?

Kind regards, Paul
Jasjot • 12 years ago

Hi Yoast
I put the focus keyword almost every time in the first line (after H1), however, many times, I get a yellow or red dot in the analysis saying:
The page title contains keyword / phrase, but it does not appear at the beginning; try and move it to the beginning.

Most of the times, it is the first word of my post. Any work-arounds?
Peter DeMott • 12 years ago

Hello from someone who just uses WordPress, but does not know the lingo of SEO. Is there a pdf tutorial that does not use words like “taxonomy” or that explains things just a little. When I get to a line that says “robot meta” or “taxonomy” I have no clue and leave the box blank. I want to fully use your program’s capabilities buy I am completely hindered by all the programing lingo which I do not have time to learn. Thanks, Peter
Bartosz • 12 years ago

Thank’s for the quick reply – I’m happy to hear the changes are on the way. Maybe I was a bit rude in my language – sorry for that. I just have to remember that in Anglosphere I should use more subtle words to express the same idea. Generally I really appreciate you work – just wanted to give you a feedback from perspective I haven’t seen here above.
Bartosz • 12 years ago

Hi,

Everyone seems to say WOW with this update but that’s the first time I downgraded WordPress SEO. Some good features are added but from me perspective – I use WP as CMS for clients, 1.2 brings some unnecessary changes and addons:
1. SEO columns – there should be a way to disable it
2. SEO filter select – dont see people ever using it, no way to disable it either
3. Focus keyword icon – does it have to be on black background, where all the WP admin panel is white?
4. A row of SEO check in Submit metabox – why do I need that if I have a whole SEO metabox few lines below?
5. Disabling of SEO metabox for non admins doesn’t seem to work (Or I didn’t understand the security idea)
6. No way to (at least) visually hide SEO metabox or SEO check row in Submit metabox – they don’t have id’s. The metabox doesn’t have a proper WP naming (seodiv or whatever to be able to remove the metabox)
7. Strings missing for translation

I love WordPress SEO, but not this version.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Oh and btw, “you don’t see”, “there should be”, i see a lot of judgement calls from your side, I’d appreciate it if you would really take in the functionality and see whether you and / or your clients really wouldn’t use it. Because I doubt they won’t.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hey Bartosz, I love honest feedback, especially when I’ve already tackled most of it already :)
  
  For 1, 2, 4 & 6, check the new filter added in 1.2.2.
  3 is already changed in the development version.
  5 i’ll look into and 7 is currently being dealt with :)
Richard Theuws • 12 years ago

I really love the beautiful SEO-buttons!
Michael • 12 years ago

I’m looking for a way to block specific pages with robots.txt. Is this possible with your plug in?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Why with robots.txt? If you don’t want them to appear, you should use a noindex meta, not robots.txt.
Joe Koppel • 12 years ago

I notice that when I do search in Google, site:(sitename) and it returns all my website results it keeps putting “-Lower My Glucose” on the end which is the name of my website that I don’t really want there. Do I need to check the “force rewrite”?

I do all my SEO on the page or post and not on the Titles & mets page.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  It does add that to each title yeah, so if that’s not in your title template, it might be a good idea…
  - Joe Koppel • 12 years ago
    
    Not really clear on this. Do I just check the box to “force Rewrite” or do I need to mess with the title template. I normally do the title in the page or post I am working on below the article.
Brian Hentschel • 12 years ago

Hi Joost,

I love your plug in. As more of a novice user, should I wait to install the updated version of this plugin until most of the bugs are worked out?

Thanks, Brian
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  To bugs only affect very small portion of users, so you should be ok now, but of course you can wait for another few days and you’ll see 1.2.3 apear :)
Randi Thornton • 12 years ago

Hi again: Quick question. If I delete the existing plugin to use the dev version because of problems, will all of my page titles, meta descriptions etc be lost? Thanks, just wanted a quick clarification before do this.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hi Randi,
  
  delete it through FTP, don’t delete it through the WP Admin, then you should be fine. Deleting it through the WP Admin would trigger the uninstall method, which would not delete particular post meta’s, but would delete your settings.
  - Randi Thornton • 12 years ago
    
    Hi: Thanks for the helpful info. I did just that and all settings were saved. However updating to the new dev version did not solve my 404 error problem. See http://wpwbb.com/sitemap_index.xml. I read any earlier post about caching plugins that might be interfering and I am not using a cache plugin. Ideas? Help? Suggestions? If it helps this issue occurred when I did the plugin update. It worked beautifully prior. Thanks soooooooo much.
Jerry Standefer • 12 years ago

Joost, since I have been using your SEO plug-in, I have been finding many of my post on the first page of Google! With the new color coded buttons it makes it simple to make the adjustments necessary to rank number one. I am using your plug-in on all my blogs. Thanks for the great work,
Jerry Standefer
JBSNET Marketing
Sue Surdam • 12 years ago

Thanks again for this great plugin. I have been following a LinkedIn thread about this plugin and one member brought up a problem with home page title and the numbers 1234 being added to the end.

This seems to be the case for the default setting of the home page title. Although the numbers can be easily deleted, it is of concern that anyone who just loads the plugin and runs with the default settings will have those numbers on their home page title.

I also seem to be missing the instructions for changing the title tag on your theme. Your tour slide mentions instructions on the page, but I couldn’t find them. Is changing your template still faster as mentioned on the previous version?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Yeah that’s actually a bug in the auto detection algorithm, will be fixed in the next version.
  - Sue Surdam • 12 years ago
    
    Thanks, I’ll pass that on to the group.
andrew • 12 years ago

Hi Joost, You did a great job again. “The reason I left it out was simple: I didn’t want people to optimize for that last percent. Now, each post, page or other post type will get a “score”, but there are only 4 options:” I understand the improvement but for me as a colorblind person I prefer the words bad (red),poor (orange),ok (yellow),good (green) next to or in combination with the colors
georgina • 12 years ago

Hi Joost – As well as everything else(!) Thank You for offering your post in pdf and printable versions – with text size choice too. Another of your thoughtful attentions to detail, which make such a difference!
Jas • 12 years ago

Hi yoast !
Is there anyway to show the title as *post title* | *sitename*?? What all changes need to be made?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  That’s quite easy to do using the title templates under SEO -> Titles & Metas -> post types. Set the title template for posts to %%title%% | %%sitename%% and it should work.
Mike Borger • 12 years ago

Fantastic, Yoast. You keep providing great value again and again to the community.

Beginner question for you that I don’t get. Why are the default settings for Taxonomies (and Post Types) NOT set to “noindex, follow”? I think I’m confusing a key concept. It would seem to me that if these pages, for example a ‘real estate’ category page, are set to be indexed and followed, then it would create duplicate links in how my site’s presented (ex. site map) AND therefore in Google’s index. What are the true ideal settings and what am I not understanding properly? :) Many thanks.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Some of that depends on your theme. If that shows excerpts on archive pages, there’s not really much of a reason to noindex it as it’s not completely duplicate, if it shows full posts, noindex is usually a good idea.
  - Mike Borger • 12 years ago
    
    Got it. I use Genesis parent and AgentPress 2.0 child, so excerpts only and I can set them to index. Thanks.
Adam Robinson • 12 years ago

Sorry this is going to seem like a dumb question but I’m still relatively new to this and only been at it for 2 months. But what exactly does “Clean Up the Head” do and is it recommended that you do this? Will this affect how my site runs in anyway?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hi Adam,
  
  The top two (I think, on mobile so doing this from the heart) deal with WLW and xmlrpc, these are used for external editors. If you don’t use those it’s save to hide them.
  
  If you run a blog, you wouldn’t want to hide the rss feeds, if you run a normal site without a news section, you would want to hide them.
Joe Koppel • 12 years ago

I am lovin this new upgrade! The issue I have is that as a novice most of this stuff is over my head. Someone needs to make a step by step tutorial to walk us through all the settings and features and recommend if and how we should use them all.

I’m just sayin’
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  I will at some point, for now though, the defaults are pretty darn good :-)
Ondrej • 12 years ago

Any plans for context help? The recent post “Common sense for websites” acknowledges that a gardener should not need to become a SEO expert. So for instance the option “Noindex subpages of archives” doesn’t really help me when I don’t know what may be the reasons for checking/unchecking it. THAT, in my book, would be a major update. W3TC got this very right, to give an example.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  You’re 100% right. It is something I want to do better but I first needed to improve on the interface and the default settings for that to be doable :-)
gallo sane • 12 years ago

Hi Joost de Valk thanks for this update and it is great to take a look at it, I would like to know if there is a way to earn by theblog of WordPress, this great site? is it possible to promote banners or online business by WPsite? thanks replying
scott • 12 years ago

First off, I love your plug-in, and this new update makes it much easier to use and learn about best SEO practices. Thank you for all your hard work!

I have two problems. I can’t un-check ‘use meta-keywords tag’. I tried the solution posted above by checking ‘force rewrite titles’ and this did not work – when I save the ‘use meta-keywords tag’ goes back to checked. Is this because I may have pages with this meta data entered? Would I have to clear those pages before being able to un-check this option?

I think it would be good if you could choose in your facebook OG settings to have one image used even IF the page/post has other images. I have pages with many images, but the default image is first on the list and therefore last in the list of images you can choose when sharing/linking on facebook. Some users want one image/logo used on facebook regardless of page content, but perhaps selectable for blog posts. Just my two cents.

Being able to choose a facebook image for all pages, and then being able to over-ride that on specific pages/posts would be super awesome.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hi Scott,
  
  for the first one, can you check the development version? You can download the development version from here, or you can download it directly here.
  
  As for OpenGraph: I always leave the choice with the end user. Always.
  - scott • 12 years ago
    
    Thanks for the speedy reply! I will download the dev version and test.
    
    For the OG, I understand your philosophy here, perhaps having a default image that will always render last on the OG list (and first in the list of user choices) would ‘suggest’ a default image to the facebook user. Good for a generic logo but leaving specific image choices as well.
    - Scott • 12 years ago
      
      Just to clarify what I am saying about Facebook. The way facebook works is not logical (your plug-in is plenty logical!) They seem to pick the last image in the page as the first choice for sharing. So although the first image in your post might be the most relevant, it’s the last image in the post that facebook shows as the first choice. So even reversing the way this OG info renders would help make the image choices offered more relevant. Preferably with the ‘default’ image listed last, if you want a default image.
      
      I have hardcoded a default image in my WP header, which renders after your OG code, but because there is so much other code spit out in the header between your OG tags and my hardcoded image, facebook does not use my last image first in their list of choices, even though their debugger tool shows them in this order. Go figure, facebook works in strange ways.
Richard • 12 years ago

What did your plugin do to my site???
It’s all screwed up!
Title is changed: spaces and numbers added to the end.
Tags moved.

When are you going to get a handle on the English language and writing for your users as compared to developers so that we can make educated decisions as to whether or not we want to use your plugin?
It is obvious from all the comments above that your big changes were terribly tested (if at all) and are racking up thousands of hours of unnecessary work on the part of people who had some modicum of trust in your offerings.
This is terrible. Thanks for causing us all kinds of unnecessary costs.
- Spencer Belkofer • 12 years ago
  
  Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this plugin, personal or business affiliation with Joost, Yoast BV, etc. and my comments are a representation of my own views.
  
  First and most uncontroversial, you’re comment about Joost’s English is laughable. In the same sentence you criqute of Joost’s use of the English language, you make FOUR grammatical mistakes. (Perhaps you should study the language a bit more?)
  
  Second…and again I only speak for myself…you are an embarrassment to, not only to yourself, but to everyone who uses this plugin. It is this exact type of attitude that makes people want to make EVERYONE pay for EVERYTHING….so they don’t have to deal with insolent freeloaders like you.
  
  Third…if you’re so smart and wonderful, why don’t you go and create your own plugin? It’s people like you that TRULY amaze me. How ungrateful can a person actually be?
  
  Finally…I thinks it’s hysterical that you claim to offer SEO services on your site (http://website-ev.com/services/) when you’re clearly incapable of providing those services without a free plugin. I wonder if you’re clients (you know…the people who pay you for your “expertise”) know that?
  
  Just do us all a favor and keep your selfish negativity to yourself.
  
  Spencer Belkofer
- Harvey • 12 years ago
  
  I think a full refund is in order. ;)
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Terribly tested? You have no clue! You see a couple of issues here, most of which are already fixed, and dare to make a judgement? Please use another SEO plugin and stop reading my blog.
  
  Or you could get an idea of the amount of users and configurations we’re talking about. The update has been downloaded over 100,000 times already. Most of the issues arise due to conflicts with other themes and (often commercial) plugins. I dare say 95% of the issues are caused by other themes or plugins being coded badly, as is probably the case on your site too.
  
  If you were a paying customer, you might have some grounds for complaints, you did however not have to pay one dime. The software is free and open source, but also comes without a warranty.
  
  Now that we got that out of the way, what is exactly happening on your site?
  - Richard • 12 years ago
    
    And yes, I do have a clue.
    For starters:
    
    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-appending-of-numbers-to-title?replies=16#post-2903622
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      Richard, bugs happen. Live with it. One more time: if you’d paid for the software you might have had a reason to complain. For this plugin though, you did not pay. So you could friendly ask for support, or see if you can find the cause of the issue and submit a patch, or use another plugin (you’ll find other plugins have bugs too though :-) ).
      
      If you think that your way of approaching me is normal, you’re wrong. Change it, or I’ll just ban you from commenting here again.
Randi Thornton • 12 years ago

Hi:

First I am one of your biggest fans and love your plugin. I recently updated to the latest version using the auto update feature on a wp multi site install. A couple of days later I noticed a sitemap error message in Google webmaster. After investigating, I see all the sites on my network are gettting 404 errors. See http://wpwbb.com/sitemap_index.xml. I also noticed that when in the network admin dashboard and I scroll down to the sitemap field the field has this: http://wpwbb.com/sitemap.xml which also is a 404. My hosting company suggested I uninstall and re-install the plugin but I am concerned about loosing data for 26 websites. Any help, suggestions is greatly appreciated! Thanks.
- sugar • 12 years ago
  
  For me too. Errors 404 on sitemaps. Everytime I go in SEO->Sitemaps XML settings, simply update and immediately works, but one day or two later I see errors again in
  Google webmaster tool.
  Do I have to install the dev version to solve this problem?
  - ^ Post author
    Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
    
    Nope, that’s another plugin messing with your rewrite rules..
    - sugar  • 12 years ago
      
      Could it be W3 total cache? I haven’t changed nothing but Yoast upgrade, and WP upgrade (anyway, after the problem).
      If you think it’s W3, can you suggest me please where I should check to?
      
      sugar  • 12 years ago
      
      Tried to insert again SEO plugin sitemap URL in W3TC settings,, but didn’t work. Anyway, maps are visible at their URLs. The error in GW it’s the same:
      
      446 problems, URL not valid, correct it and resubmit, Main tag: image, tag: loc.
      
      sugar  • 12 years ago
      
      Sitemap has worked well for two days. Then yesterday, after upgrade to 1.2.3, I had again 404 error from my server (in addition to conflict with W3TC fatal error – now fixed, I hope).
      Solved again clicking the saving button in plugin XML sitemaps options. Today there’s new errors in GW, on post-sitemap.xml.
      Translation: 446 problems, URL not valid, correct it and resubmit, Main tag: image, tag: loc.
      Before the new error I made this change: in W3TC page cache settings I’ve changed “sitemap URL”, instead of your sitemap URL like it was before, I changed with the one of Google XML sitemap plugin, like description advice: A compliant sitemap can be used to specify the pages to maintain in the primed cache. Pages will be cached according to the priorities specified in the XML file. Google XML Sitemaps is recommended for use with this feature.
      I had already Google XML sitemap before your plugin, and worked well together before, then I deleted the Google XML Sitemaps plugin thinking it was quite enough your sitemap.
      But in a few days I lost indexation, so after a while I reinstalled the plugin, and everything was all right before your two latest upgrade.
      Now how can I fix new errors? I have to put again your sitemap URL in that W3TC page? Why, if W3 advice is for the other sitemap?
      
      sugar  • 12 years ago
      
      Yes, thank you for your time
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Hmm of course it works fine now :) will check again tomorrow.
      
      sugar  • 12 years ago
      
      I have inserted URL in name
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Can you show me the URL? It *could* be your W3 Total Cache settings then indeed…
      
      sugar  • 12 years ago
      
      A static one from my server. In other words, the classic internal page, the one I created for my site.
      After an update on your sitemap page, it’s visible and I have send it again to google, so now the error isn’t visible.
      But it’s the second time in two days that I got these errors.
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      What kind of 404 are you getting? A WordPress one? Or a static one from your server?
Harvey • 12 years ago

I love the colors the way they are. When I saw a blue light … I thought hmm… yikes this post is still no index. Maybe a switch to offer colors and letter option for the colorblind.
Michael Erb • 12 years ago

The plugin is excellent. A MAJOR problem I have is the use of colors for your score system. There are many colorblind people out there, I am among them. Your colors are useless for me. A letter score is infinitely more useful than colors.
- Steve Lovelace • 12 years ago
  
  If you want to differentiate the colors without using numbers or words, you could try shapes instead. Perhaps a red octagon, an orange triangle, a yellow diamond/lozenge and a green circle. For gray and blue you could use a square or hexagon.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  I’m open to suggestions and patches are welcome :-)
  - Dave • 12 years ago
    
    I’m colour blind too and can’t see the difference in the colours. A percentage score would be a good alternative, Joost.
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      Nope. I purposely decided to stay away from percentages to net let people focus specifically on them… I’ll see if I can easily add an option to make them text based ( Bad, Poor, OK, Good ).
      
      Ari Salomon • 12 years ago
      
      That is a classic solution to the issue of icons that are not 100% clear in their functionality – add text to the icon so users can learn over time what the icons mean. so i agree that adding words to the colors will be a great solution.
Geoff • 12 years ago

On Rel Author – in the User block do you just add in the long number Google+ gives or do you need to put in a whole URL (I think when I clicked it was an https?) Thanks for all the hard work!
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  The complete URL!
Cheryl Smithem • 12 years ago

Thank you for all that you do to provide this great plugin and functionality. We recommend it all the time. I’ve just bumped a bit a cash into your Paypal account to show you a little love.
Jasjot • 12 years ago

Thanks for the upgrade !! A little problem though. Whenever I try to share a page, the only thing that shows up is *pagetitle*, though in my settings I have duplicated exactly what you showed in the pic here at the top. I even tried %%title&& | %%sitename%% AND %%title%% • %%sitename%% but still no effect. My website’s name does not crop up either in snippets or when I share somewhere. Any way out? Afyer changing setting, I always rewrite titles (i.e, check that option)
Jos • 12 years ago

On some of my first site I still use All-in-one-seo. Shame on me. I will replace them immediately. Of course I had to do that sooner, but now I’m sure I have to do it real fast.
Ari Salomon • 12 years ago

thanks again for the amazing plugin. seeing status in the pages list is really smart.

question: I see pink in the list of status colors – does that one appear under certain conditions? or perhaps it was part of that icon set and you are not using it?
also: the concept is great but i think there are too many colors. red/green/yellow is really clear but now you have some colors that are not tied to a score like blue.
also, the icons are not matching the UI as good as they could be.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hi Ari,
  
  – I haven’t thought up a nice way to make the pink show up yet ;)
  – The icons are indeed not matching the UI as well, so they’ll be changing in the next minor release, the colors aren’t going to change though. I understand it takes a bit of getting used too but I wanted to distinguish between noindex and no focus keyword set for the posts overview.
  
  I understand it’s not 100% intuitive but after some getting used to it it’ll probably work just fine :)
  - Christopher Wulff • 12 years ago
    
    Love the plugin, but I wonder whether you might reconsider the “colors aren’t going to change.” For the ~3% (for some reason 8% in Australia) of the male population that’s colourblind, the red and green are pretty tough to tell apart, especially when isolated.
Tony Payne • 12 years ago

I have to head off and check my settings, these updates sound excellent, thanks Yoast. At the risk of sounding awfully tacky, “you are the man!”. I can’t recommend this plugin highly enough.
Karl • 12 years ago

Loving the colour coding, can now spot all the pages that I didn’t do so well on, more work tweaking but its all in a good cause, Rankings and thanks agin
Raja • 12 years ago

Great plugin. Migrated from SEO Ultimate to WordPress SEO and love that snippet preview. The upgrade was very smooth. No issues what so ever. Thank You…!
Kent • 12 years ago

Did you pass the WP 3.4 update unscathed, unlike the Theme Framework fiasco?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  No problems for me… I was well prepared though :)
Rajesh • 12 years ago

Sorry to say that still homepage title showing page number (1 of…)It should not display numbering on homepage, by the way thankx for the update and providing such a nice plugin..!
James Giroux • 12 years ago

I have found this upgrade incredibly helpful. The new SEO check feature has made my SEO ten times better. I am new to SEO but knew I needed to get into it, this plugin has helped me better understand how to start with SEO integrated. Thanks for the update, I look forward to more!
Sandra • 12 years ago

Hi! Thank you for this update, which I installed on 3 out of my 4 sites yesterday. This morning, I noticed multiple sitemap errors on google webmaster tools for these 3 out of 4 sites. Does anybody have the same thing? Would you have an idea on how to correct it?
The errors are parsing errors on each of the sub sitemaps, saying : We were unable to read your Sitemap. It may contain an entry we are unable to recognize. Please validate your Sitemap before resubmitting
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  I think I know what the issue is, in which case it’s already fixed in the development version, but to verify can you share the URLs to the sitemaps that throw errors?
  - Sandra • 12 years ago
    
    Here are some sitemaps from each site :
    – sitemap 1 site 1
    – sitemap 2 site 1
    As well as :
    – sitemap 1 site 2
    – sitemap 2 site 2
    As well as :
    – sitemap 1 site 3
    Is that what you thought?
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      Hmm glad I asked. No it’s not. Your server is throwing internal server errors and not even getting to WordPress. It could be related to a caching plugin?
waqas • 12 years ago

is it recommended to noindex pagination?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  I do it, but to be honest I’m still in doubt as to whether it’s a good thing.
Bryan • 12 years ago

I love this plugin, but I use another one for page analysis. Feature request: I’d really like to have the option to disable the page analysis module.

Thanks!
- Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  I added that in the 1.2.2 release, check the change log, it’s a filter you’ll have to call though, I’m not going to make it an option in the admin pages.
Heather Wood • 12 years ago

I have noticed on my own website that every time I activate and deactivate the plugin, I have to go back into the settings to re-check “force rewrites”. for some odd reason the plugin is not saving the settings.

Does this happen to anyone else?
- Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  It auto detects whether it’s needed and turns it off when it thinks it isnt needed, is it detecting it wrongly on your site?
  - Heather • 12 years ago
    
    Yes, it is. When I don’t have force rewrites, all the titles just revert to http://www.ravenousravendesign.com.
    
    Obviously, I don’t want that :(
    
    I’m using Striking Theme from Theme Forest.
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      That’s very weird. I’ll be in touch over email.
Trace • 12 years ago

Anyone have any ideas on how to hide the “Default Settings” button? Don’t see any CSS identifiers we might use to hide it …. It’s the first thing clients see, but we would really prefer that they not undo all of our work. ;) Same thing when viewing all pages, we would prefer to not see “SEO”, “SEO Meta”, “Meta Descr.”, “Focus Keyword”, as well, it’s confusing for clients. I know you can manually uncheck these items in the “screen options” section in the upper right hand side, but this is tough when you have hundreds of sites …. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!!!
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hi Trace,
  
  no. And to be honest; is that really what you want? You don’t want your clients to know about optimization so you can do it? I think you should be explaining it to them…
  - Trace • 12 years ago
    
    That’s strikes me as quite an odd thing to say. Onboarding, improving the user experience, these are things we do to provide our users with wildly varying levels of interest and skill the best possible user experience. We’re not barbarians! haha. Giving people granular control and options they don’t understand or care about accomplishes nothing in our particular scenario….. #lessismore :)
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      But by taking away stuff like page analysis you’re taking away their ability to understand their issues. That’s not onboarding, that’s keeping dumb…
      
      Seth Stevenson • 12 years ago
      
      I’m with Trace on this one. While I love the page analysis function. It would be nice if I could hide this for some of my editors and authors. I run a large website with 40+ active people working on the same site. Many of them are older individuals who get confused easily if you clutter their workspace. So I try to keep it as minimal as possible for them while keeping all the options for myself. Some sort of toggle based upon roles would be nice. Keep up the good work!
  - Trace • 12 years ago
    
    No, they don’t want to be bothered, but we reduce all unnecessary functionality that is going to confuse them or enable them to break their site …. we’re providing a fully managed and hosted service for them and providing a simpler user experience. :) Plus, less things breaking means less support tickets.
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
      
      Well if you insist, check the changelog for the last version :)
      
      But I seriously think you’re not doing anyone a service.
John • 12 years ago

Hi Joost, after I upgraded to 1.2.1 I get a blank posts sitemap. I just upgraded to 1.2.2 and it still happens.

I don’t think it’s related to other plugins or the theme as it didn’t happen before upgrading to 1.2.1. What shall I do? Downgrade?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  I think i’ve just fixed it in the development version; literally 10 minutes ago, can you try? You can download the development version from here, or you can download it directly here.
  - John • 12 years ago
    
    Upgraded to development version and it’s fixed! Thanks for the fix and thanks for the great plugin!!!
Katie • 12 years ago

I am getting this error after upgrade "Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class TextStatistics"

I am using Easy WP SEO and Yoast SEO both, wondering what happened after this latest update.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Yeah that’s a bug in Easy WP SEO. It doesn’t check whether the class is already declared. I added a “fix” in 1.2.2 but it’ll still crash because they don’t have that check. I don’t know which plugin that is either though, it’s not on the WP repository?
  - Katie @ Women's Magazine • 12 years ago
    
    Do you know which file in Easy WP SEO should i modify to fix this bug? Yours is pretty good but don’t want to loose that plugin too (it’s a paid plugin :) )
    - Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      I obviously don’t know the plugin. Also, if you paid for it, you might want to stalk the Dev you paid for his plugin for support, instead of the Dev of the free plugin you’re using? :-)
      
      Michael Cordova  • 12 years ago
      
      The PCRepairMan fix below worked for me…
      
      PCRepairMan  • 12 years ago
      
      Hi Joost. I have written a quick fix for the Easy WP SEO conflict with your plugin. I tried to contact the developer but had no reply, think he doesn’t support it any more. Hope this helps a few people, it works for me.
      
      Easy WP SEO TextStatistics fix
      
      Keep up the good work on WP SEO!
      
      Dave
      PCRepairMansBlog.com
wolkendampfer • 12 years ago

Joost, installed it for the first time, and immediately felt the urgent need to subcribe and everything. Great work. Outstanding.
Karl • 12 years ago

Thanks, love the new update – this plugin really gets better and better!

I’ve run into an odd issue though. I’ve got a custom post type (clients) and when I visit a single client page (using the single.php template), the standard WP loop outputs my client data twice (title, content).

It only happens for custom posts (not posts or pages) and the problem goes away if I disable the WordPress SEO plugin.

Pretty odd behaviour! I’ve not changed many plugins or made theme modifications lately and only came across this problem after upgrading to one of the latest WP SEO releases.
- Karl • 12 years ago
  
  Really not sure this was due to WordPress SEO, but the update was one of the only things I’d changed, and only seem to have had the problem with double content after latest update.
  
  Either way, managed to find the cause in the end. For my custom post, I had two get_children queries, which both ended with wp_reset_query. I updated these to wp_reset_postdata and things are working fine again.
  
  As said, not sure this was due to WordPress SEO, but thought I’d post back here anyway. Thanks again for the plugin, great work!
Angus • 12 years ago

I updated the plugin and now the dashboard tabs aren’t functional. I see the tabs but nothing happens when I click on them. On a different site I switched from Greg’s H P SEO to Yoast, and same thing. Sites have different themes, The Restaurant and U-Design, and some different plugins. Yoast worked beautifully (which is why I switched the other site over) until this newest update version. I’m on wp 3.3.2. Tried clearing the cache(s), but doesn’t help.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Have you cleared your browser cache? It’s probably a script that needs to be updated in your browser cache. If that’s not it, please disable all other plugins and see if it still doesn’t work…
  - Angus • 12 years ago
    
    Been there; done that, but I deactivated each plugin again to make sure. Clicking on the tabs takes me to:
    
    http://MYSITE.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#topgeneral
    
    http://MYSITE.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#tophome
    
    http://MYSITE.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#toppost_types
    
    http://MYSITE.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#toptaxonomies
    
    http://MYSITE.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#toparchives
    
    http://MYSITE.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles#toptemplate_help
    
    But nothing happens.
    - Angus • 12 years ago
      
      p.s. I deactivated the plugins and cleared the cache again after I downloaded your latest version about an hr ago.
Duane • 12 years ago

While inside the Dashboard on the Post section, there are now columns for SEO, SEO Title, Meta Desc, Focus KW… Is there a way to remove them from the Post section of the Dashboard? Thanks in advance.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Just click the tab in the upper right and uncheck them.
Sugar • 12 years ago

Hi, great plugin and update, I’m looking forward to trying new things but… how come there’s no more choice to see or not the date in description snippets?
I had just taken it off (I imported from AIO plugin and date was visible), and I had just rewritten ALL the description snippets in ALL posts for use the space properly.
Now date has reappeared and the description is no longer perfect and ends with ellipsis. I can’t re-write all the snippets.
There is no way to remove the date?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Well the reality is Google shows more dates than ever… I’ll add a filter in the next release though so you can easily remove them with a few lines of code.
  - Sugar • 12 years ago
    
    Thank you.
    The sad part is that I’m forced to add it every update, the choice via admin panel was a good idea.
    So, for the moment I add the code (can you tell me please how is exactly the code?), but I think I’ll have to slowly change again my snippets, if there’s no solution.
    In reality I thought it was the opposite, because in the google search results I see that in almost cases date is missing.
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Well you can, with the new 1.2.2 release, just add the following to your theme’s functions.php:
      
      add_filter( 'wpseo_show_date_in_snippet','__return_false');
      
      And it’ll not show the dates ;)
      
      sugar  • 12 years ago
      
      Update: I found out that I had missed the double underscore before “return”, now there are no errors behind the admin bar.
      Still, that filter doesn’t work (also, the admin bar still doesn’t disappear even if it’s disabled).
      
      sugar  • 12 years ago
      
      There’s something wrong with the filter. It’s a bit tricky and I’ll try to explain it as best as I can. The code doesn’t work and creates an error at the top of the “Posts” page in backend. An error that I can’t read because it’s almost all covered by the admin bar, I can barely see his presence behind the bar. So I try to remove the admin bar in “My profile” to read it, but the bar is still there, disappears only in the front end of the site. Without the code, the error disappears behind the bar, but I discovered that the admin bar remains in the backend thought I disabled it. I hadn’t noticed before because I have always the bar, and I think it could be caused by a plugin. I don’t know which one ’cause now I don’t have time to test it and then this thing doesn’t interest me that much now because I want to resolve the date-snippet problem.
      So, remains that the code doesn’t work, I don’t know if is correlate with the bar admin problem. Of course I cleaned the cache several times and I added the line by hand, directly to the file via FTP.
CarolP • 12 years ago

Nobody else getting a blank sitemap page ?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Usually a result of other themes or plugins…
- CarolP • 12 years ago
  
  nvm, looks like it was an issue with my W3 Total Cache setup.
Vincent • 12 years ago

Fantastic keeping up the work on the plugin, it just got a lot better. Have now donated thanks again. I hope others do too.
DaveZ • 12 years ago

On the Titles & Metas page, no matter which tab I click on, I only see the first one. I’m using Chrome on Windows 7 with the current version of WordPress. Thanks for all the great work!
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Have you tried completely clearing your cache? And if that doesn’t help, disabling all other plugins? I bet it’s either of the two…
  - DaveZ • 12 years ago
    
    Good call, thanks – I cleared the cache and it’s working now.
Mary • 12 years ago

Super. Thanks for the update.
Susan Fuller • 12 years ago

It just gets better and better. This has been my absolutely favorite plugin since I discovered it about 6 months ago. Thank you so much Joost!
Scott • 12 years ago

You describe 4 colors, then show 7 color boxes. Go, Mauve!
JP • 12 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to address the issue I reported. You’ve worked hard on this plugin and it shows.
Leigh • 12 years ago

Hi Yoast, I’ve was testing my settings after I updated the plugin. I have date archives set to noindex, but in the source code for those pages, the noindex tag is not showing up. It worked before I updated. Please advise. Thanks.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hey Leigh, you’ve uncovered a bug. Thanks; I’ll have it fixed in the next release, it’s got an ‘s’ too much twice on line 406 of class-frontend.php :)
  - Leigh • 12 years ago
    
    Ok. Thanks Joost.
Darryl Alexander • 12 years ago

Hi there

Getting the following error with new update, using easy Wp SEO for my on page seo
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class TextStatistics in /home/bodysco/public_html/wp-content/plugins/easywpseo/onpageseo-readability.php on line 35

Any ideas?
- Sreejesh • 12 years ago
  
  I get the same error after updating Yoast SEO. But it seems that it should be fixed by the developer of Easy WP SEO.
- Tushar • 12 years ago
  
  i am facing the same problem. Using both WP SEO & easywpseo. This happened since i updated your plugin 2 days ago.
  - Rajesh • 12 years ago
    
    Easy WP SEO does same work of showing score out of 100 based on headings, bold and alt tag etc. I don’t think so you’ve to install both Easy WP SEO and WP SEO by Yoast. WP SEO is very good plugin with extra features than Easy WP SEO, and Easy WP SEO plugin is not free plugin and even not in WP directory.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  That’s not in my plugin but in Easy WP SEO :)
  - Darryl Alexander • 12 years ago
    
    When I disable your plugin all is good and only happened after the upgrade.
    
    Could I perhaps download the previous version somewhere?
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Well you could but that wouldn’t help you much. What does that other plugin do? It’s not on the repository… It should check whether the class is already defined.
      
      Dave  • 12 years ago
      
      Same issue here.
      
      I use both plugins (both nice tools) and it only started with the last WP SEO update.
      
      Easy WP Seo gives you a score based on SEO features, similar to your plugin but it’s a bit easier for my website clients to use.
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      “it only started with the last WP SEO update.”
      
      I get that my latest update exposed a bug in that plugin, but I seriously cannot fix it. Contact the author of the plugin you paid for.
Paul Olyslager • 12 years ago

Great update, thanks for that! Two quick questions though: I integrated a function to add a Google+ textfield per user myself. On the author archive page, I use this info to link to the author’s Google+ account with a rel=”me”.
First question: is it still necessary to add a rel=”me” into this link? and the second question: If your update is replacing all that, how can I call the google+ account setting from the author and integrate it in the link?

Cheers!
Paul
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  – The rel=”me” is not really needed anymore if you have this, but it won’t hurt either.
  – it’s a standard user contact method, I just updated and republished my old article about it: user contact fields in WordPress.
  - Paul Olyslager • 12 years ago
    
    Great, works like a charm! Thanks.
Michael • 12 years ago

Is there somewhere where i can find a updated recommended settings guide with screen shots for the latest version
Dabid • 12 years ago

Something crazy happened on my site with the new update.

The Meta information on all of the pages and posts is still 100% perfect, but now all of my attached pictures don’t have any Meta Titles or Meta Descriptions anymore when I view them on the web. I filled in all of the information in WordPress for these and I can see it’s still filled in for each picture, and they’ve always worked before, but now they’re all gone site-wide when I actually look at the images on the web.

In the “Title & Meta’s” Title Template in the SEO, I still have “%%id%% %%title%% %%modified%%” filled in, but none of that information is showing now on the web. It’s just gone.

Is there a change somewhere in the upgraded SEO where I need to click a box or something to get the Meta information working properly again for my photos? I’m really confused about what’s happened exactly.
NetzBlogR • 12 years ago

First off: Thanks for your brilliant plugin.

But I have a bug report to do: The slug problem has returned in my blog… :-(

I use a plugin that usually changes our German Umlauts “ä”, “ö” and “ü” in a post title into “ae”, “oe” or “ue” in the slug.

But now they are translated into “a”, “o” and “u” – the common WordPress style. As said: Version 1.1.8 (or was it 1.1.9?) fixed it.
david • 12 years ago

Hey Yoast, this is brilliant – as a by the by I only use the snippet and page analysis section – I skip pretty much everything else apart from setting the sitemap.

Any progress on the video sitemap plugin?
CarolP • 12 years ago

Hey Joost,

Just upgraded, now the sitemap loads a blank page.

Have tried a reinstalled, have tried disable and re-enabling the sitemaps, no difference.

Thanks!
Shawn Plep • 12 years ago

So this plugin is still…free? Amazing.
- Wellbeingtips • 12 years ago
  
  No isn’t free it works on donations.
  BTW Great Job Joost!
Allam • 12 years ago

waoo thanks for this update,this great for rank and drive more traffic to pur blogs..
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 12 years ago

Just released version 1.2.1 with fixes for most of the bugs discussed in the comments above :)
Alena • 12 years ago

Yes, it was disabled and after I’ve enabled, it’s works perfectly- no mobileadmiral.com in my titles anymore. Thank you so much! Also, if you have noticed problems with PremiumPress, our huge community of peoples who using this theme would really appreciate, if you would contact Mark and discuss this issues. Again, thank you for all you do.
Alena
Harvey • 12 years ago

Sir, I have been unable to get the noindex feature to work for link categories. I’m honestly not sure if it’s a conflict with another plugin like My Link Order. I was waiting for this next version (very nice) to see if the issue would be resolved.
Alena • 12 years ago

Hi, I am unable to uncheck “Use meta keywords Tag” in General>Sitewide meta settings. It let me to uncheck and after I click “Save settings”, returned to checked status.
Thanks.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hi Alena, I’ve heard that bug once more but I’m unable to reproduce it… Which theme are you running?
  - Mike Borger • 12 years ago
    
    I’m also unable to uncheck ‘use meta keywords’. My option for rewrite titles was not checked upon plugin update install. I’ve toggled it both on and off to see if it would get the KW option ‘unstuck’, but no luck. It keeps checking the box. I’m using Genesis with the AgentPress 2.0 child theme.
  - Alena • 12 years ago
    
    My Theme is CouponPress from PremiumPress (Mark Fail).
    I have another problem-in a Titles & Metas>Post Types there is a coupons page with a title template setup %%title%%. It’s shows in a search %%title%%MobileAdmiral.com without any dashes. Coupons page is different than a regular one.I just need to show %%title%% without Mobileadmiral.com.If you need to check something,I will give you my logins.
    Thanks.
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Hmm I’ve had issues with that theme before. Have you tried contacting them and seeing what they say?
      
      Alena  • 12 years ago
      
      Yes, it was disabled and after I’ve enabled, it’s works perfectly- no mobileadmiral.com in my titles anymore. Thank you so much! Also, if you have noticed problems with PremiumPress, our huge community of peoples who using this theme would really appreciate, if you would contact Mark and discuss this issues. Again, thank you for all you do.
      Alena
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Could you check whether on SEO -> Titles & Metas it says that force rewrite is enabled or disabled? And if it is disabled, could you enable it and see if that changes things?
      
      Alena  • 12 years ago
      
      My titles was fine before I’ve updated today your plugin.I have used before All-in-One SEO and didn’t have a problem as well.It’s just happened today with this update.I can contact Mark if you think this is not this plugin issue.
      Thanks.
Jenny • 12 years ago

Love the new updates!

I can never get the Facebook insights thing to work. I click ‘Add Facebook admin’ and it goes to a 404 page on my site, even if I go to FAcebook first and logout (if I do this, and login, I get a 404 on redirect). Not really sure what I’m doing wrong as it should be pretty self explanatory.

This isn’t anything new; it’s happened on previous versions also. Plus, I have never been able to select a different FB admin on a different WP install, it only allows the one choice. Hopefully you have some insight on that too.

Thanks for the best plugin for WP!!
- Erich • 12 years ago
  
  I’m having the same problem as above. I was actually trying to correct the validation error for when I ran into this problem.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Could you tell me what it redirects you to, and where your wp-admin really is?
  - Jenny • 12 years ago
    
    Hoping you can help on this. :)
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      It’s weird, are you running any security plugins or such?
      
      Jenny  • 12 years ago
      
      Any ideas about this?
      
      Jenny  • 12 years ago
      
      Nope, none. This isn’t anything new; I’ve never been able to connect to FB through the plugin for some reason. Can you tell me the benefit of connecting? The opengraph data works fine without it. I haven’t been able to find any info on it specifically. Thanks :)
Mezanul • 12 years ago

After update, NewRelic has picked up more than 100+ errors. Here’s what I am receiving in my error report.

Error: Missing argument 2 for wpseo_replace_vars(), called in /home/********/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/frontend/class-frontend.php on line 113 and defined

…/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/inc/wpseo-functions.php (35) …/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/frontend/class-frontend.php (113) …/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/frontend/class-frontend.php (245) in WPSEO_Frontend::title called at ? (?) …ll_user_func_array called at /home/********/public_html/wp-includes/plugin.php (170) …_filters called at /home/********/public_html/wp-includes/general-template.php (609) in wp_title called at ? (?) …ll_user_func_array called at /home/********/public_html/wp-includes/plugin.php (405) …tion called at /home/********/public_html/wp-content/themes/genesis/header.php (21) in require_once called at /home/********/public_html/wp-includes/theme.php (1115) in load_template called at /home/********/public_html/wp-includes/theme.php (1091) …template called at /home/********/public_html/wp-includes/general-template.php (34) …lled at /home/********/public_html/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/framework.php (30) …nesis called at /home/********/public_html/wp-content/themes/genesis/index.php (20) in include called at /home/********/public_html/wp-includes/template-loader.php (43) in require_once called at /home/********/public_html/wp-blog-header.php (16) in require called at /home/********/public_html/index.php (17)

Please look into the bug.
- Mezanul • 12 years ago
  
  I forgot to mention that I’ve also included the sample stack trace (that’s below the error) for your reference.
  
  Thank you
  - Mezanul • 12 years ago
    
    Sorry for commenting again, the error report I copied and pasted was clipped. Here’s the complete line from my server error log.
    
    PHP Warning: Missing argument 2 for wpseo_replace_vars(), called in /home/******/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/frontend/class-frontend.php on line 113 and defined in /home/******/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/inc/wpseo-functions.php on line 35
    
    I also found that all these errors occurred when Google Bot was crawling /author/…
    
    Any ideas? Thanks again. :)
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Yes, just found and fixed it, will be committing to development version in a bit.
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Yeah please update to the latest development version.
      
      Mezanul  • 12 years ago
      
      Thanks for looking into it! Should I update the plugin with the development version?
      
      Thanks for the awesome new features! :)
Franco • 12 years ago

Hi Joost, thanks for this wonderful update! I noticed a small warning in Appearance -> Menus -> Categories box:

Warning: Missing argument 2 for WPSEO_Taxonomy::custom_category_descriptions_add_shortcode_support() in /some/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/admin/class-taxonomy.php on line 126

There’s one error per available category. I hope this helps.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Thanks, yeah that one I fixed in the development version already :)
  - Franco • 12 years ago
    
    very nice, keep it up! :)
Charles • 12 years ago

First of all, thanks for the incredible plugin and advice offered on your site. My problem is that after the upgrade, the SEO settings widget that shows on the “edit post” page is no longer working as before. it displays all 3 tabs in a really large widget box. clicking the tab titles does nothing. Any ideas?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Yes, empty your browser cache. it should have done that for you but I think you’re getting old JS and CSS.
  - Charles • 12 years ago
    
    Now I feel stupid. =/ I tried that initially and it didn’t work. It worked this time, however. Thanks again!
Dabid • 12 years ago

When I try to sort by the SEO “colored light” option in the “All Posts” tab of my dashboard, it only returns a small fraction of my posts 10-20%, and the only ones I see are green lights or grey lights. Are we supposed to be able to sort by SEO like that, or am I breaking the sort function?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  No that’s a bit of a bug… If, before you use the sort function, you first paginate through all the posts, it’ll generate the score for all of them. When you then sort through, all of them will appear when you sort.
free classifieds website in india • 12 years ago

amazing update by yoast plugin..thanks a lot.

keep growing :-)
Rilwis • 12 years ago

Great update! Big thumb for this version. Thank you very much.
E-Rock Christopher • 12 years ago

The best SEO plugin for WordPress just got better! With the future of authorship mark-up playing a bigger role in SEO, this is going to really help a lot of tech-challenged people. And I agree with you Joost on trying to get that exact 100%. Google has made it clear via the Penguin Update that you should be cautious to not over-optimize. Great solution and like how you can show a client now at a glance their page listings and see their site has been optimized. Great job! Thanks!
Mr Bukit Besi • 12 years ago

Hi Joost, unbelievable that all these are free. Thanks for the great plugin. With this major upgrade I have to learn more and explore how to fix SEO updates to my blogs. Everything is ready here but the significant thing is the implementation the first. Thanks for the article and tutorial above. You are so kind. Till then. From Bukit Besi, Malaysia
Heather • 12 years ago

Although, I am so grateful to you that you offer this plugin for free, I almost wish sometimes it wasn’t. Now anybody can have a chance to this professional tool that I find to be extraordinary. I have used it from day one and will continue to use it forever. I really want to write a blog post about it, but am afraid of my local competition using my same tools. what to do, what to do…:p
Elaine • 12 years ago

Surprised to read people don’t use the snippet preview and page analysis as much. I can’t live without these :-)
Madhu Nair • 12 years ago

Hi Joost,
Thanks a lot for the update. The traffic signal indicators is awesome.
I have about 700+ posts and I had been tracking the quality of the posts in a spreadsheet based on the page analysis results. This is a killer tool.

Your tool has helped me a lot in terms of getting my pages up in the ranking. Appreciate all the work you do in this niche space.

Thanks and have a wonderful day.

Cheers,
Madhu
Thierry • 12 years ago

Hi Joost. this is a great update! especially the author settings. just regarding rel=”author”. What do you recommend, shall I use my personal google+ account or the company-page google+ profile? thanks.
Chris Blackwell • 12 years ago

Great update Joost. The Google+ integration was exactly what I was looking for.

There is still one problem with custom taxonomies. If you chose to not index archive pages, it doesn’t put in the noindex,follow on custom taxonomy archive pages.

So pages like the series type on my comic book website (http://comicville.net/series/star-trek/) are still being indexed by Google. Is this something I can change in the settings, or is it something to do with how WordPress handles the taxonomy archives?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hi Chris, I think, to be honest, that you’re wrong :) isn’t the custom taxonomy term you’re checking specifically set to index by chance?
  - Chris Blackwell • 12 years ago
    
    You are right Joost. I didn’t even see the new Taxonomies tab when I went into the new version. Sorry for wasting your time. Donation coming your way ;-)
Rajesh @Technology Blog • 12 years ago

Great improvements, default settings is very good option for new bloggers. Thanks a lot for keeping this plugin free.
Jared • 12 years ago

I’m so excited for this update! Custom taxonomy support has been on my wish list for months. I had one of my developers looking into how we could create an add-on to support it but here it comes. Thanks! It’s also really great to see the API Docs for anything we want to customize in the future. Thank you.
Hans • 12 years ago

The Sitemap has an error in post-sitemap AND page-sitemap:
“XML-Verarbeitungsfehler: nicht wohlgeformt”
- Hans • 12 years ago
  
  YEAH! Thank You Yoast, with Update 1.2.3 my sitemap is working again !
  
  Great Plugin !!
Norine • 12 years ago

Oh no. Was all excited about new release, but it seems all my settings are gone. Titles and descriptions gone. Did I do something wrong? Is there a way to get them back without re-entering everything? (Using a thematic child theme)
- Michael Swartz • 12 years ago
  
  Having the same issue when doing an upgrade. Title is appearing outside of the Title tag. How do I revert back?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  What exactly did you do? You deleted the plugin?
  - Heather • 12 years ago
    
    Same problem, thematic child theme. Upgraded my seo plugin and this happened. Whats the title doing there??
    http://imgur.com/OdoMe
    
    Here is the site
    http://aaaexpresslock.com/
    - ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Perfect, so the development version fixes it.
      
      Michael Swartz  • 12 years ago
      
      Development version fixed it. Thx.
      
      Scott  • 12 years ago
      
      … so how long until 1.2.1?
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      It’s there already.
      
      Norine  • 12 years ago
      
      Much obliged. All seems well again. Many thanks for your persistence and perseverance in solving this.
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Heh, Norine, please update to the latest development version again, that was debug code I should have commented out.
      
      Norine  • 12 years ago
      
      No luck here. Have tried force rewrite on/off, and disabled all plugins. Pages and individual posts are ok, but my category archives get strange output in the head inside a pre tag, which appears at teh top of the page.
      Specific example:
      “stdClass Object
      (
      [term_id] => 21
      [name] => Celebrity Kite Flyers 2012
      [slug] => celebrity-kite-flyers-2012
      [term_group] => 0
      [term_taxonomy_id] => 21
      [taxonomy] => category
      [description] =>
      [parent] => 14
      [count] => 31
      [cat_ID] => 21
      [category_count] => 31
      [category_description] =>
      [cat_name] => Celebrity Kite Flyers 2012
      [category_nicename] => celebrity-kite-flyers-2012
      [category_parent] => 14
      ”
      Any ideas?
    - Heather  • 12 years ago
      
      Yoast, i uninstalled wordpress seo and this is what happened!! go look, don’t know how to fix it!! I installed the dev version and then it still didn’t fix it. oh no :(
      
      Heather Wood  • 12 years ago
      
      The culprit was WP Minify! Not Super Cache.
      
      Heather  • 12 years ago
      
      It is unchecked. I dectivated all plugins. Reactivated only WP SEO and everything seems fine now. I will begin to activate each plugin one by one till I find the culprit.
      
      Thanks Yoast! Sorry for going crazy :)
      
      Heather  • 12 years ago
      
      Ok, I think I know what it is. The plugin is conflicting with another plugin. When I deactivated all plugins my site went back to normal. I have a feeling it may be WP Super Cache…
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Please uncheck the force rewrite checkbox on SEO -> Titles and Metas and see if that fixes it?
  - Norine • 12 years ago
    
    Thanks for the quick reply. No, I updated from the dashboard. As I look deeper, I see the data is still there, but the title is appearing before the tag, so it looks like I have no title. Would checking the force rewrite box change this?
    - Simon Rimmington  • 12 years ago
      
      Having the same problem with Thematic Child themes. All the information in the head is moved to the body. Meta Tags, scripts, stylesheets etc. Plus the Title is now outside the tag. Any ideas?
      
      Simon Rimmington  • 12 years ago
      
      The dev version works well, thanks Joost :)
      
      ^ Post author
      Joost de Valk  • 12 years ago
      
      Ok I’ve figured out the problem I think. Could all of you please try the development version and report back?
      
      You can download the development version from here, or you can download it directly here.
      
      Norine  • 12 years ago
      
      yes, that’s kind of what’s happening with my thematic child theme. I checked force rewrite box, and that partly fixes it; it puts the title within the title tag, but still leaves a fugitive title before the tag, which appears at the to of the actual page. There are also 2 separate meta descriptions wtihin the source code. The second is wrapped between the Yoast comments.
zimbrul • 12 years ago

I think now you should write a user guide-how to optimise your site for SEO with Yoast’s WP SEO Plugin-and sell that user guide because for the beginner, the guy who lay the eyes for the first time on the plugin is rather complicated.
The good thing is that the plugin comes now with the pre-defined settings as you say will fit most of the users.
Anyway, great work…there are paid plugins out there that do less than your WordPress SEO plugin.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  I think most of it’s actually covered in my WordPress SEO article :)
Zimbrul • 12 years ago

Great work but the snippet analysis still don’t work properly. Although I got the focus keyword (in fact two words) in page title or in description (auto-generated with this occasion) it still doesn’t recognise the keyword. Is this because I’ve got an “in” between the keywords?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Yeah that’s the problem. It doesn’t strip stopwords there (and it probably shouldn’t).
The Bearded Goose • 12 years ago

Regarding Rel=”author”: Is this or can it be on a per post or page basis?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  It *is* on a per post / page basis.
  - The Bearded Goose • 12 years ago
    
    Oh, well duh, yeah. I should have just waiting until I had the update done. Sorry about that. And thanks for this plug-in, dude. You rock!
Cory Howell • 12 years ago

I really think the addition of the default setting(s) will be most beneficial to users. Too often, the plugin gets installed and the user a) does nothing or b) configures it incorrectly. Neither of these provide the intended results so I’m glad that “default” will now get these folks to the next level.

Thanks for your work over the years ~ great stuff!
Mary Kay Lofurno • 12 years ago

Looks like some nice updates. Thank you. Mary Kay
Tim Marini • 12 years ago

Here’s the error, it’s using too much memory:

[Tue Jun 12 08:56:06 2012] [error] [client 216.51.44.5] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 122880 bytes) in /var/www/marini/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/menu.php on line 126, referer: http://kxrtonline.com/wp-admin/update.php?action=install-plugin&plugin=wordpress-seo&_wpnonce=dea7b81e1a
[Tue Jun 12 08:56:11 2012] [error] [client 216.51.44.5] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 122880 bytes) in /var/www/marini/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/menu.php on line 126
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Hmm not too much I can do about that Tim.
  - Tim Marini • 12 years ago
    
    Ok. I will look at things more. Thanks for your help! Killer plugin by the way!
Nico • 12 years ago

I’ve been using your plugin for a couple of months now. It really has some great options. Can’t wait to run a test drive of the new version! Thanks for this great plugin!
Tim marini • 12 years ago

After updating to 1.2, my Plugins page and several other admin pages fail to load with a 500 internal error. Why would that happen? I don’t admin my server.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Sounds like you had an incomplete download…
  - Tim Marini • 12 years ago
    
    Thanks, Joost. I will see if I can reinstall it. I used the WP plugins updater to do it. It’s all automated.
    - Tim Marini • 12 years ago
      
      Joost,
      
      I had my admin delete the plugin. I reinstalled it and it did the same thing and I’m getting Error 500s again. I’ll try to get a log or something.
Mikael Rieck • 12 years ago

I meant “now” and not “not” too long :)
Mikael Rieck • 12 years ago

Great work. I suppose there is a reason for not being able to remove the date in the meta description? Means that I will have to change all meta descriptions since they’re not too long. :o/

/Mikael
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  Well Google almost always shows those dates anyway…
  - Mikael Rieck • 12 years ago
    
    Yes they probably do. Anyway, really cool update. Especially the green / yellow / red display. So much easier.
    - Richard • 12 years ago
      
      What do you mean “Well Google almost always shows those dates anyway…”?
      
      All my Google results do not show the date. Not sure why it would be removed since those who want the date can have it (the default) and those that do not can have it removed. This forces me to count the number of characters with each new post.
      
      I just don’t understand the reasoning.
      
      Theodor • 12 years ago
      
      Me too, the date was successful removed in the SERPs of all my blogs. Now I have to search for a new solution.
      
      But anyway, thanks for this fantastic plugin.
Andy Kinsey • 12 years ago

when will it be available for auto update / pushed update from wp directory?
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  It is now, going to your updates page in WordPress should force a check.
Craig • 12 years ago

Joost, this plugin is simply amazing. Thanks for the update and keep up the amazing work.
Roger • 12 years ago

Wahooo. I’m diggin the new look of the overview page for pages and posts……..good call on the versioning numbers as well. Thanks Joost
Florian • 12 years ago

Thanks for the great work! The new features look really cool and I will have a look at the update version later!
Rev. Voodoo • 12 years ago

This is pretty much awesome, thanks for keeping this valuable, FREE tool growing and improving! Can I offer a suggestion, and I really do hate to be THAT guy.

On the settings page, the title is worded Title’s and Meta’s. Kill the apostrophes in some future rev please! Apostrophes denote possession (or a contraction), not plurality.

Sorry! :( OK, now it’s time to update all of my sites – the upgrade looks great, and I’m pretty happy to get it running everywhere, thanks!
- Scott • 12 years ago
  
  I didn’t like the apostrophes either, but decided that it could be correct because it can be read as “Title’s SEO”. But removing the apostrophes seems better, as it also is the SEO of Titles.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  THANKS for being that guy. Fixing it now (but won’t force an upgrade for it ;) )
  - Rev. Voodoo • 12 years ago
    
    Thanks! ;) I’m poking around the plugin now. It looks very good. Much more intuitive, a very good thing!
Gautam Doddamani • 12 years ago

wao cool man..will check it out now. thanks for releasing updates so often..you are the best! :D
Carly • 12 years ago

Is it too geeky that I’m excited about upgrading on all my/client’s sites?

:)
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  You’re forgiven Carly :)
Gyi Tsakalakis • 12 years ago

Great update to a great plugin. Plans to add easy authorship. & Schema admin? Thanks for all the hard work. I hope people are showing appreciation via donation.
- ^ Post author
  Joost de Valk • 12 years ago
  
  This already includes the authorship changes; forgot to add that in the post :)
  - Gyi Tsakalakis • 12 years ago
    
    I was going to reply with just a: ;)
    
    But it was too short… Great update.
Cian Murphy • 12 years ago

I really like the Green light feature in the pages section. It will cut my on-site optimisation time in half now that I don’t have to check every post individually.
Yousaf • 12 years ago

Means I have to do some work tonight then! Thanks for keeping this amazing plugin updated Joost.
- Haroun Kola • 12 years ago
  
  Me too. I’ve just updated my sites to the latest version, and looking through all these new changes, I have lots to do. I’m most excited about the authorship changes.