Which SEO WP Plugin?

[GeoMal]

A question to the web dev and SEO folks. Which SEO Wordpress plugin do you recommend these days? All it needs to do it provide an easy route for entering page Title and Meta Description, and Yoast seems awfully bloated for that.

 

[UK Business Directory]

Hi

I use All In One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

@fisicx has made this one that looks like it fits your requirements exactly: https://quick-plugins.com/free-things/no-fuss-seo/

 

[fisicx]

This one: https://quick-plugins.com/free-things/no-fuss-seo/

I built for people who just need to do as you want.

Edit : Scott beat me to it!

 

[webgeek]

ABY - anything but yoast

 

[Miroslav Chodak]

I'm surprised to see Yoast being put down. I have used Yoast on hundreds of sites. Never had an issue. Works beautifully. Updates are issued super-fast. There has been a security issue in the past, but I believe that has been fixed long time ago.

 

[fisicx]

If you have a busy site Yoast can double your server load.

It loads each page internally which means everything get called twice: all your scripts, styles and content. It's a bonkers way to do anything.

 

[Miroslav Chodak]

Wow, never knew that! Where can I read about this in more detail?

 

[webgeek]

Yoast has never gotten the 301's vs canonical's right, being a died in the wood canonical lover who refuses to acknowledge any of the hundreds or thousands of examples of sites whose SEO has been wrecked because of the stupid canonical tag vs 301 handling, especially now that there's sites moving from http to https.

Don't get me started on this - I've repaired more sites than I care to remember - all of which suffered the same issues with canonical signals telling search engines the source page was canonical, when in reality the redirected destination page should have been the sole canonical. It's all down to using a half-arsed tag incorrectly - just lazy, silly implementation globally.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

What do you do when you currently have Yoast installed? If I replace it do I have to redo all titles etc???

 

[fisicx]

I had a conflict issue with Yoast - it was processing a contact form twice resulting in all sorts of errors. I raised a ticket and all the support team did was tell me I shouldn't be using a properly configured WordPress function. This is when I discovered they passed the wp_loop in the background. It's a plugin that is long past it's sell by date - full of redundant features and the hopeless traffic light thing.

What do you do when you currently have Yoast installed? If I replace it do I have to redo all titles etc???

My easy to use plugin will import all your Yoast page titles and descriptions.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Hi Fisicx - Thank you for that. It seems that google likes easy SEO!

 

[ukbf0001]

I have used Yoast and All in One . Found them both to be easy to use.
Would be interested to hear of any articles where any Yoast issue has been identified and what his response has been.
In my experience Yoast were always on top of their game (so are All in one SEO as well)

 

[fisicx]

Yoast SEO is the best SEO plug-In for WP

No it's not.

Yoast does the same basic SEO as all the others (page title and description) - just about everything else is superfluous. And on a busy site Yoast can really slow down page load speeds as it is very resource hungry.

 

[Miroslav Chodak]

on a busy site Yoast can really slow down page load speeds as it is very resource hungry.

Yes, you've said as much. Could you provide details or point us to an existing resource?

 

[fisicx]

There aren't any responses to point to. Yoast certainly won't tell you this and it was only because of a support query I discovered the double page load. If you have a busy site (high numbers of page views) install Yoast and monitor server and site performance. Then remove Yoast and run the same tests. You will see a considerable improvement. If your site only gets a few visitors each day then it won't make any appreciable difference.

Like all things webby, you have to run your own tests.

 

[Miroslav Chodak]

With over million installs, it's surprising there exist no reputable sources you can point us to. I mean, even if Yoast is not keen on making this public, he does have competitors. And, they would be delighted to shout about this into the world, wouldn't they?

 

[fisicx]

There are plenty of people complaining but they all have relatively small sites so don't notice the problems. Those who do complain are almost ignored by Yoast: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/very-disappointed-in-yoast-seo-plugin-updates-slows-sites-down/

And today on the support forum it says: "228 of 425 support threads in the last two months have been marked resolved.". But on their website they make it quite clear if you want full support you have to pay for the upgrade.

There are better SEO plugins but they don't compete - that's not the WordPress way. If you bad mouth the competition you could fine your plugin removed from the repository.

 

[Miroslav Chodak]

I saw that and few other threads. All I can say about it is that plugin conflicts are normal in WP and none of the info I have seen proves the problem is caused by Yoast.

Yes, their support on the WP forums is abysmal, but it's also completely normal that professional support is reserved for paying clients.

As for the "not the WP way" comment, there are many ways to get your message out there and avoid being traced back to a competitor...

 

[fisicx]

If you want to continue to Yoast that's fine. I'm just reporting the performance drop I've seen when Yoast was running.

 

[webgeek]

I'd be more concerned about the SEO impact from the canonical vs 301 handler that's all fubar.

It's been discussed on here over the years, so go back and read the threads. I'd bet Tin can remember some of these as well.

The problem occurs when you've got automatic canonicalisation pointing to self, then you redirect, such as a category, moved product/post or migration to https.

Google then tries to put both the canonical destination and the 301 destination into the index, despite them being different URL's, and knocks out some of your preferred content (into the dupe content/omitted secondary index), and dings you for poor quality, thus firing a torpedo at your rankings.

It leaves site owners wondering why they're on page 7 or 11 instead of 1 or 2. They then do the site command, check the omitted URL's that aren't indexed but should be, and those in the index which shouldn't be, and have to sort out the mess manually. It's a fugly mess to find, much less sort.

I've seen it, had to fix it, and complained to Yoast many times - and he couldn't give a rats !"$£! about it.

 

[Miroslav Chodak]

Thanks for explaining the cannonical/301 issue, Robb! I agree, it might be a problem.

 

[fisicx]

From another thread I wrote:
I'm working with a client that has thousands of daily page views. Replacing Yoast with another SEO plugin reduced server load by almost 40% which meant it could deliver more pages to more people much faster. Time to first byte dropped by about 0.5 seconds (on average over the day).

And the sitemap Yoast creates takes no account of page priorities (because apparently Gogole doesn't either). The wrong priority can kill your ranking - this has been tested many times.

The traffic light system is broken in all sorts of ways (mainly because they require a focus keyword). If you follow their advice you can kill your ranking.

If you understand the basics of SEO you will soon realise that Yoast (and other SEO plugins) aren't actually very good. Use them for your page titles and descriptions and leave everything else alone.

 

[JMack986]

Project Supremacy is meant to be really good for Wordpress sites.

 

[antcurious]

I'm quite surprised by the Yoast hate here, not sure about bloat, as I use 90% of it's functions. But the canonical issue worries me. Does all-in-one SEO suffer from the 301 problem?

 

[fisicx]

It's not hate, it's just a good understanding about the services Yoast offers, 90% of which are unnecessary. And on a small site you won't notice the performance issues, it's only on sites with high traffic where problems occur.

As far as I know AIOSEO doesn't have the same canonical issues.

 

[antcurious]

Thanks, noted. It will come down to the same thing it always comes down to, testing!

 

[Alby10]

Use All in One SEO, for many sites and it works well. Wasn't aware of fisicx plugin, but will give it a go if its still available. Agree on Yoast, found load times to be quite long compared to others.

 

[CreativeSeoCompanyBristol]

I have used both 'All In One SEO' and Yoast and although the 'All In One SEO Plugin' is not as popular as Yoast, I do find both okay to use when it comes to editing Title and Descriptions.

It is great reading your various views, which is eye-opening on some of the downsides that one may not necessarily be aware of, so I'm keen to learn more and read up any available resources on this.

 

[Alan]

Favoured by pros - the SEO framework https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/

 

[fisicx]

Yoast is primarily meant for on site SEO (tweaking the architecture and structure of the blog or website) whereas Easy WP Seo is more suitable for on page SEO which means optimizing the content of the post.

Where did you get that bit of conjecture from? Yoast is ALL about optimising the content. It just happens to do it badly - their traffic light system is so inaccurate it's should just be ignored.