Technical SEO

Dive into the technical side of Yoast SEO features. This category covers crawling, indexing, schema, sitemaps, canonical URLs, redirects, and all the behind-the-scenes elements that help search engines properly understand your site.


Error: “If your robots.txt were writeable”

The Yoast SEO plugin (and thus your entire WordPress install) is not allowed to write to your robots.txt file. Please…
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Error: Cannot redeclare yoast_breadcrumb()

Error: Cannot redeclare yoast_breadcrumb() If you’re getting a breadcrumb error that looks like this: Your theme or another plugin is…
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Why does my sitemap have gray links?

Why does my sitemap have gray links? The gray links in your XML sitemap identify the URLs that your browser…
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How to add an external sitemap to the index

How to add an external sitemap to the index Our Yoast SEO plugin creates sitemaps on the fly for the…
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Add theme support for Yoast SEO breadcrumbs

Add theme support for Yoast SEO breadcrumbs If your theme declares support for yoast-seo-breadcrumbs, Yoast SEO will render breadcrumbs for…
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Why am I not getting rich results for my content?

Why am I not getting rich results for my content? If you use Google, some content gets displayed as rich…
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Images in XML sitemaps

Images in XML sitemaps Yoast SEO creates XML sitemaps, which by default include an entry for every public post and…
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Missing or invalid date in XML Sitemap

Missing or invalid date in XML Sitemap Google Search Console may flag your sitemap for a missing or invalid date…
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Plugin compatibility with paginated content

Plugin compatibility with paginated content Yoast SEO adds rel="next" and rel="prev" tags that let search engines know that they are on a paginated archive…
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Yoast XML sitemaps on NGINX servers

Yoast XML sitemaps on NGINX servers Our plugin generates sitemaps dynamically when you enable the sitemap feature. In some cases,…
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Page analysis has been disabled

Page analysis has been disabled The following message will appear when a theme or plugin developer turns off the functionality…
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You should add [XYZ] to the httpd Config File

You should add [XYZ] to the httpd config file You may receive the following warning. As you’re on Apache, you…
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How to fix white screen when activating or updating plugin

How to fix white screen when activating or updating plugin When a plugin and/or theme conflicts with other plugins and/or…
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URL redirects with encoded characters

URL redirects with encoded characters Unusual looking URLs cause a lot of confusion as to the best practice for redirecting…
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“Call to undefined function filter_input()” fatal error

“Call to undefined function filter_input()” fatal error If you’re getting the following error, it means that your hosting setup has…
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Parse error: Unexpected T_FUNCTION

Parse error: Unexpected T_FUNCTION Do you see the following error? Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_FUNCTION in/PATH_TO_WORDPRESS/wp-content/plugins/PATH_TO/file.php on line 41…
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Why doesn’t Yoast SEO create a sitemap?

Why doesn’t Yoast SEO create a sitemap? Our sitemaps are created dynamically. If you’ve recently made changes to your site,…
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Shortcodes not rendering

Shortcodes not rendering If you have shortcodes in your content that are not rendering, you could see, for instance, something…
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Sitemap error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity

Sitemap error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity Are you seeing one of the following sitemap errors?…
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I’m getting a “We’re unable to save the file .redirects” error

I’m getting a “We’re unable to save the file .redirects” error If you’re getting this error, it means that the…
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