I'm Ready To Throw Yoast SEO Under The Bus !

I Admit It - Once Upon A Time...

I Fell In Love With Yoast SEO

Early in my WA training - almost 2 years ago - as I was merrily cruising along through the Entrepreneur Certification lessons, I was blinded by the additional bells and whistles of Yoast SEO.

So, I bit the bullet and decided to foresaken All-in-One SEO for the "greener grass on the other side of the fence." After all, Yoast SEO made it oh - so - easy to import all my All-in-One plugin settings.

The advantages of increased scrutiny of my posts and ease of enhancing my SEO to achieve higher Google rankings made partnering with Yoast SEO a match made in heaven.

Pretty Soon - Though,

The Honeymoon Was Over

One day, Yoast SEO kicked me where the sun don't shine - just when I least expected it - before the holidays in 2017. That durn plugin was submitting my media images as URLs in my sitemap - which made Google go absolutely nutso crazy.

Believe me, when I say I have an exhorbitant number of images on my website. And, I was gettings hundreds upon hundreds of 404's because of it. My website stats began dropping like a rock!

I contacted Yoast SEO support - and they said they "were sorry - but, never fear - they had a plugin to fix just that - called, Yoast SEO: Search index purge." I just had to keep it activated for at least 6 months to give it time to force Google to purge all those nasty 404's.

As they promised, all of the 404's were being turned into 410's - slowly - while "the purge" was taking place. I guess 410's were okey dokey but, they still left a bad taste in my mouth.

That was almost a year ago. Here it is - 2019 - and guess what? I still get a few straggler 404's now and then - as well as a few 410's.

Time To Raise The White Flag

I SURRENDER

Now, I'm on the verge of going back home to All-in-One SEO. But, first, I would like to hear your thoughts - before I take this bull by the horns.

Questions

1. What would you do? Would you make the switch back?
2. Will it be just as easy to import all my Yoast SEO settings back into All-in-One SEO?
3. If I do go back, will it cause any issues - especially with Google? (As you can see, I'm a bit antsy about it...)

I will be waiting with baited breath for all the wisdom I can glean from my WA compatriots!

Jim, the Lifelong Gardener