Yoast SEO Update Causing Major Problems.

Don’t be in too much of a hurry to update the Yoast SEO Plugin on your WordPress Site

The crew at Yoast’s SEO Plugin have released a major update today… or updates should I say.

We’re holding off updating the WordPress Sites covered by our Unlimited WordPress Support service until we can confirm that the new version is working correctly.

A quick visit to the Yoast SEO 3.0.1 plugin forums will give you an idea of some of the problems with this major update that is supposed to: Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast SEO plugin.

Yoast SEO Plugin Updates includes:

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where users where getting error notifications about how their site was not indexable when in fact no check had been performed yet.
• Fixes a few broken links to help docs about the OnPage.org integration.
• Fixes an edgecase where the indexability check would go wrong for sites that filter the home url.
• Fixes a bug where the admin email that was sent to report the current indexability status was not rendered as HTML.

Release Date: November 18th, 2015
Features:

• Adds realtime content analysis to the Yoast SEO metabox for all post types and taxonomies.
• Adds a tool to recalculate all SEO scores using the new client side analysis.
• Adds a content analysis plugin for parsing shortcodes before the content is analyzed. This means the snippet preview will now take the rendered content of shortcodes into account.
• Adds a content analysis plugin for parsing replace vars before the content is analyzed, allowing templates set in the Yoast SEO admin to work everywhere.
• Adds a weekly check if the homepage is indexable (in collaboration with OnPage.org).
• Adds possibility to import titles, metas and settings from the WPSEO.de plugin.
• Adds possibility to set Facebook (Opengraph), Twitter and Google+ metadata for taxonomies.

Enhancements:

• We’ve completely revised the UX of the Yoast SEO metabox. We’ve introduced multiple sections which in turn can contain one or more tabs.
• Makes the Yoast SEO metabox on the taxonomy edit page the same as on the post edit page.
• Makes sure the capability for the General Settings menu is also wpseo_manage_options_capability.
• Adds a fix to the tour allowing for multiple plugins to use WP pointers at the same time.
• Makes sure all Yoast SEO settings pages are also accessible through the WP admin bar.

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where the og:image would not be set, even when a default image was available.
• Fixes a bug where the links in the sitemap would ‘randomly’ change from https to http or the other way around (in very rare circumstances).
• Fixes a bug where it was not possible to upload different images for different social media in the post metabox.
• Fixes a bug where users would see the after-update notice, but were not allowed to visit the about page.
• Fixes a bug where we were not properly splitting taxonomy metadata when a shared taxonomy term got split through a Cron job, props Daniel Homer.

The changes to the Plugin are aren’t the only issue I’m personally concerned with.  The new Yoast SEO interface while much more simple for beginners, lacks the flexibility that WordPress Blog owners with more that a little skill relied on to improve their Search rankings at Google and Bing.

… and only reveal them as a reward to those with a paid premium membership.

In my opinion that’s where the real issue with the new Yoast SEO plugin will lie.   Anyone with a number of sites, or responsibility for the SEO rankings of a number of sites will now be forced to upgrade to the premium Yoast SEO plugin in order to get the flexibility they enjoyed previously.

The premium plugin is $69 and anyone with 5 sites is going to be paying $130/year to access those features.

The bug fixes will be cleaned up quickly by the team at Yoast, what may take more time is sorting out the new pricing and what features become unlocked.