Reconnecting...
The Yoast SEO Plugin Update Has a Major Bug That Negatively Affected Search Rank.
On May 30, 2018, Yoast founder Joost De Valk posted on his blog an apology for a major bug in the recent Yoast 7.0 and 7.2 update. This bug will negatively affect your site ranking with Google. You need to fix it.
I know many people in Wealthy Affiliate use this Yoast SEO plugin. If you have recently updated your Yoast SEO to version 7.0-7.2, you need to read his post to learn more about the bug and how to fix it.
Here is the link to Joost De Valk apology and detailed discussion of the bug: https://yoast.com/media-attachment-urls/.
This bug related to the attachment URL. This attachment URL is created by WordPress every time you upload a picture. The attachment URL normally redirects to the post itself because the attachment URL only contain the picture with no content. The URL redirect serves as a way to improve your site SEO.
The bug in new Yoast update turns off the attachment URL redirect. As the result, it increases the number of superfluous URLs generated by the WordPress website. This increase will negatively affect your site rank as Google detecting abnormality with your website. Many websites have been affected by this bug which promoted Yoast founder to issue a step-by-step guide to fix it.
It is important that you check your Yoast SEO setting, according to Mr. Valk post, to insure the proper redirect of the attachment URL. If you do nothing, your site rank and traffic will drop substantially. If any of you notice a big drop in traffic recently, this might be the cause.
This fix is very simple, all you have to do is log into your website, go to Yoast SEO setting under Search Appearance, then click on the Media tab, the setting for the attachment URL should be “Yes,” not “No”. You should read Mr. Valk’s post for further detail. Good Luck.
I have one question regarding Yoast, hope you don't mind. Is it neccessary to have the pro-version?
I'm thinking of installing Yoast, but the free version seems so "thin".. So I thought I might just stick with All-In-One SEO.
What's your opinion?
Reply
I like all in one because I do not trust the pre-set feature. Also, I only use the free version because for me the premium for either plug does not add any more value to my site SEO.
The only additional value you got from Yoast premium is the multi keywods focus which for me has no value since I know and want to control the keyword density. However, some people love this feature.
Like anything, a premium plugin will not get you top rank, it just make the SEO process easier to manage which to me the free version already offered this.
I also unticked the box stating site map for yoast and selected the google xml sitemaps by Andre, instead through the plugin store.
When I checked this morning, I was informed that my sitemap showed as a 404 error. Apparently my few but well written articles wont get ranked if I just was ignorant and blissful as I was.
So I immediately corrected the issue. I didn't know that there was a bug related. All I saw as a prompt was If I used google xml site maps and Yoast sitemaps concurrently, then I run the risk of being negatively ranked or not ranked at all for good cornerstone content.
Surely, that is unwise if I had left it and its good that its so immediate, the way corrections can be made.
Happy tidings to writing atleast today:)
Google must be spanking me hard because when I looked at my Google Search Console - Remove URLs - I had almost 250 attachment URLs being included in my Yoast SEO sitemap.
Enter the Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge plugin - which is supposed to clean up my sitemap by removing all the attachment URLs over about 6 months.
Hopefully, Google will soon start to love me again!
It's tough to do so much hard work on my website and still get a "Google smack" for no real reason.
Not real happy with the Yoast SEO folks at this point!
Jim
Interesting also that you have to fix it manually. There is a reason for this though as Mr. Valk points out.
'The bug was simple yet very painful: when you updated from an earlier version of Yoast SEO to Yoast SEO 7.0-7.0.2 (specifically those versions), we would not always correctly convert the setting you had for the old setting into the new one. We accidentally set the setting to ‘no’. Because we overwrote the old settings during the update, we could not revert this bug later on.'
So new updates will not fix this either.
