SEO Plugin Update Screws Up More Than It Improves

Last Updated on February 5, 2022

People warned me not to perform that SEO plugin update I kept seeing notifications about. But I forgot and clicked ‘upgrade’ anyway. Now I wish I hadn’t.

Most bloggers by now have heard of Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, a term thrown about by people I sometimes suspect have absolutely no idea what it means.

SEO, for those who fall into that category, refers to practices a website puts in place to help the site land at the top — or certainly at the first page, whenever possible — of Google search listings.

SEO practices can be as simple or as complicated as anyone would like them to be. For years now, I’ve used a WordPress plugin known as Yoast. Its official name is SEO for WordPress by Yoast, but Yoast is such a distinctive name that it quickly became the name by which the plugin was referred.

What I love about Yoast is it makes me think about SEO without forcing me to get in the way of the content. It gives me a checklist, marked with colored dots to tell me that I’ve accomplished a goal (a green dot), that I’ve failed to accomplish a goal (a red dot), or that I’ve done something in between (an orange or yellow dot).

The latest update, however, seems to attempt to make some things easier, like editing the “meta description,” the line or two of text that appears in a web search results page right below the link. It also displays a little traffic light symbol with a red, yellow, or green “light” to display your post’s overall score.

But it makes life much more frustrating, however, by pointing out things it says you’ve failed to do when you’ve done those things.

Consider this example from a recent post and remember you want to see as many of them as possible to appear with a green dot:

Let’s look at some of the more common errors you’re likely to see:

The text contains 1 words. This is far too low and should be increased.

Maybe you better count again, Yoast. The text for that post contained 474 words. That’s a significant discrepancy. Before the upgrade, Yoast’s word count matched WordPress’s word count. As I type this sentence, late into the rewrite process of this post, WordPress’s official count is just past the 750-word mark. Yoast tells me this post contains “0 words.”

The focus keyword doesn’t appear in the first paragraph of the copy.

Yes it does. It does the same way I make sure it always does. Before the upgrade, the plugin recognized this with no trouble.

No outbound links appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.

There were at least two outbound links in that post. Every time I added one as I wrote, I saved the draft, hoping Yoast would take another look and recognize that a link had been added. It didn’t.

No subheading tags (like an H2) appear in the copy.

I rarely use the H2 subheading tag because I generally feel that size is not the best looking in the middle of a post. But this post that Yoast claimed had no subheading tags had an H3 and H4.

Perhaps you can understand my frustration: like any good blogger, I want to make sure I’m doing everything I can — within reason — to help people find my post. I am forced, since the upgrade, to assume that I have done so by doing the things the plugin seems unable to notice that I’ve done. But as an SEO “report card,” I’m being graded down.

I’m not the only one, it would appear, who noticed these issues after upgrading.

That’s not the end of the world, particularly for a free plugin.

If I were paying for it, I’d be a lot more angry about it. Still, there’s an obvious question I can’t help but ask: if the plugin can’t see the things I’m doing to improve SEO, is it possible Google can’t see them, either?

My page views, last time I looked, are up this year over last year, so I’d like to think better SEO may have played a part in that.

But if Google hasn’t made any elaborate change to what it looks for (and no one seems to be saying this is the case), and I haven’t made any change to what this plugin has been programming me as a content producer to do to improve my SEO, why am I suddenly not getting “the green light?”

If all else is equal, either the “scorecard” was wrong from the beginning or it has suddenly gone wrong now. There’s no other option.

So now I will work to re-upload an earlier version of Yoast, just to see whether that will restore the functionality. If it doesn’t, I guess I’ll be looking for a different SEO option — at least until Yoast is able to fix whatever caused these issues. I’m actually considering just going without a plugin just to see if it has any impact on my analytics; if I’ve been conditioned properly to use keywords properly, I wouldn’t expect there to be a huge change.

In any case, there’s an important lesson here. For any plugin that you feel you would prefer not to live without, it might be worth archiving a copy of the previous version so you can revert more easily if a major update ends up not cooperating with your site.

What do you use (if anything) for SEO on your blog? What do you like most about that choice?