Yoast SEO Analysis

Hi - I’d like to setup the Yoast SEO plugin to analyze the content of my site (using X), but after setting up pages using Cornerstone and then adding Yoast, Yoast does not recognize any content on my site at all. As an example, here are some of the errors Yoast reports:

  • The text contains 0 words. This is far below the recommended minimum of 300 words. Add more content that is relevant for the topic.
  • No images appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate.
  • The focus keyword doesn’t appear in the first paragraph of the copy. Make sure the topic is clear immediately.

All of these are things that I have solved in the content entered into Cornerstone, but it does not appear Yoast can access this content at all. How do I get Yoast setup so I can analyze my content?

I did some digging on older threads about this and found the following:

If I’m reading that correctly, it sounds like Cornerstone and Yoast’s content analysis are simply incompatible. Is that correct?

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I have experienced this same thing.

For pages where you just use the normal Wordpress editor, Yoast will work fine. But if you use Cornerstone then yes Yoast can’t ‘see’ into the content created within Cornerstone unfortunately.

It’s other functions that aren’t related to the editor, such as page title and so on, still work fine so I still find it a valuable plugin to have.

Hello There,

Thanks for writing in! Normally Yoast SEO plugin will check the excerpt and the post content. This will surely work if you are using the default WordPress editor. When building a page in Cornerstone or Visual Composer, the contents will now be wrapped in VC/CS formatting shortcodes and this comes the problem because Yoast SEO plugin will ignore any contents that is inside the shortcode. The best you can do is to insert a manual excerpts for each of your posts. To know more about manual excerpts, please check out this codex:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt#How_to_add_excerpts_to_posts
https://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt#Excerpt.2C_automatic_excerpt.2C_and_teaser

Hope this helps.

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Hello,

Does this mean that cornerstone is at the moment bad for the SEO ?

Thank you

@Thaelys - Not specifically - Cornerstone is neither good nor bad for SEO. It is simply another tool to enter content on your site, and that content is SEO-friendly or not. Yoast does a great job analyzing and explaining whether or not your content is SEO-friendly by analyzing the content on the page.

Per RueNel’s note Cornerstone is NOT compatible with Yoast in any way as the content gets transformed into shortcodes and Yoast has no way of reading this. There is a way to get this working, however X has not implemented this functionality. As a result, their recommendation is to insert a manual excerpt for each of your posts but, in my opinion, that is a poor work-around.

@RueNel - Can you please shed some light on why you have not integrated X with Yoast? They have a good KB article on this (linked in previous post)

Here’s the relevant copy:
If you’re using a page builder that does not share their content, please contact their development team to request compatibility with the Yoast SEO keyword analysis. They can learn more about this functionality here.

Hate to double post but I’m restricted on how many links I can add and apparently mentions are counted as links.

@RueNel - As @sAustinPower requested, shedding some light on this would be very helpful to the community. We have multiple XPro licenses purchased, all websites are running Yoast SEO, as well. I am not sure which update to XPro caused an issue with Yoast, but 1 of our websites is running Pro 1.1.0, and Yoast is working just fine on it (most up to date version of Yoast.)

However, our other website, running Pro 1.2.4, is having the same issues as stated by OP (also most up to date Yoast.) So rather than passing the blame to Yoast, it would be nice to see this issue within Pro fixed in a future release.

Hello Guys,

Thanks for the feedbacks. At this point, I cannot give you the right response as to why we haven’t integrated Yoast in X yet. I already have forwarded this thread to one of our developers so that they can explain more between Yoast and Cornerstone.

Please bear with us.

Thank you @RueNel, appreciate the follow up. Looking forward to hearing more soon!

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Hi There,

This is a known issue that we need to address somehow, but haven’t found the best way yet. The content for V2 elements is stored differently, so Yoast doesn’t see it and isn’t able to analyze it.

Rest assured that our Dev Team is aware of this bug and looking for the best way to resolve it.

Thank you for understanding,

Hello, people.

If you want to use the Yoast you should use the “Classic Text” element of the Cornerstone.
If you will use “Text” element then SEO plugin does not work (words counter).

Give it try. I have succes. :slight_smile:

Thanks for lettings us know. Have a nice day! :slight_smile:

Hi there,

Just wanted to clarify a few things here.

  1. This is a known issue that we have a bug report open for. Specifically, we’ll be investigating what can be done to make that analysis work again.
  2. This does not have an impact on your site SEO. Everything outputs correctly on the front end. The problem is that Yoast can’t properly access content of our V2 elements.
  3. The suggestion about using a classic text element is the best workaround.
3 Likes

This Question comes often maybe the Time for an KB Entry to Yoast SEO and X / Pro. So long this “Problem” extists.

Greets Uwe.

I second that idea - this should not be a difficult thing to find. The KB article can simply be updated to show how the V2 elements work correctly with Yoast once it’s fixed up.

Thank you for the input guys.

I have forwarded to the responsible person for consideration.

Thanks

@RueNel @friech Thanks for the updates and I am thrilled to hear that the development team is looking into this.

You’re welcome.

Thank you team for looking into this, I appreciate your efforts and interim workaround suggestion.

You are most welcome. :slight_smile: