Issues with SEO and Cornerstone Content

[bartenderonduty]

Hi Themeco Team,

I’m running into issues with performing SEO on Posts that are designed with Cornerstone. I used Cornerstone to customize the look of Posts so they match the rest of my site, however when trying to optimize the content with the Yoast SEO plugin, I’m receiving several errors, including “Keyphrase in introduction,” “Single title”, etc., which when tested on a normal non-Cornerstone Post, are not showing up as problems.

Additionally the full Cornerstone content is appearing in the Post editor, which I don’t recall seeing in the past, so I’m wondering if this is the copy Yoast is analyzing. If so, this could be problematic for SEO.

Is it possible to optimize long-form Post copy while using Cornerstone? Ideally we should be able to use Cornerstone and have SEO-friendly copy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Can you help?

Thanks!

[ruenel]

Hello @bartenderonduty,

Thanks for writing in! The text elements, contents, and styling will be stored in a post meta which is why it is only showing a shortcode and the IDs. SEO Yoast doesn’t analyze the actual page when rendered but it checks the raw content of an editor. You will have to edit the page in Cornerstone and set up the texts, headlines, and each of the tags used in your page. When managing the Yoast SEO details for the post/page, please do not alter any contents of Cornerstone because it will just be discarded. Keep in mind that only pages/posts edited in Cornerstone can be edited in Cornerstone. Editing the page/post outside of Cornerstone may even corrupt the cornerstone data and might result to an issue where you can no longer edit the page/post back in Cornerstone.

Hope this helps.

[bartenderonduty]

Thank you for the reply! I’m unclear on your response. I built these Posts in Cornerstone, but to edit meta data for SEO, we’re required to edit the Post outside of Cornerstone, in the native Post editor, since that’s where Yoast setting are accessed. In the screenshot I provided, there is actually the full content of the Post but it’s below the shortcodes and wasn’t captured in the screenshot. Would you be able to take a closer look or provide further clarification?

[rad]

Hi @bartenderonduty,

The shortcode displaying in the editor is a bug, which already fixed on our unreleased version. The [cs_content_seo] is also a new feature usually needed for search, image, and so on. But not necessarily it’s Yoast related, you still need to set your SEO meta data.

The cornerstone also has existing Yoast integration, hence, to fix those Yoast problems in your screenshots, you still need to edit your content in the builder. Like add an image element, change your headline tag type to h2 instead of h1, and so on.

So please ignore the content being displayed on the editor, and just build your content through the builder while following Yoast requirement.

Else, please provide your site’s URL and admin login credentials in the secure note for further checking, especially if Yoast is really failing to see the content of the builder.

Thanks!

[bartenderonduty]

The shortcode and page content displaying in the post editor seemed to be a bug, so thank you for confirming. I’ll be on the lookout for an update.

For the actual post content, I’m using a single text element for all of the text contents and h1 and h2 tags for headlines within that text element. Unfortunately, Yoast thinks there are multiple H1 tags, when there is actually only one. Yoast is also not recognizing the keyphrase in the first paragraph.

[christopher]

Hi @bartenderonduty,

Thank you for the details. I checked one of the single posts and found at the theme itself adds an H1 tag for the title.

So for the example on the post below:

The Basics of Digital Marketing

Please change the title from H1 to H2 and it will fix the multiple H1 issue. The theme already has the title as H1 printed in the HTML code.

For the first keyphrase, would you please kindly do a test. Create a post without the section that you added a class called hero-section-post and also do not add a title and just add the Text element at the beginning and see if it fixes the issue.

Thank you.

[bartenderonduty]

Thank you for looking into this. Switching the title from h1 to h2 did indeed fix the issue.

I also tested a post with a new section and text element with just the copy that includes the keyphrase and that did not fix the issue – Yoast still says the keyphrase was not found in the first paragraph, even though the keyphrase was the very first word in the paragraph. Yoast appears to be scanning the shortcode instead of the actual post copy since the shortcode is being displayed at the beginning of the post.

Can you suggest a fix for this?

[bartenderonduty]

Also, is there a way to prevent X from automatically adding h1 tags to posts? I run several sites with the X theme and all of them are showing me errors about multiple h1 tags. This is problematic because I have several hundred pages that would need to be updated to change all h1 tags to h2 tags. Ideally, X shouldn’t automatically embed h1 tags and headlines should be managed within Cornerstone or the post editor.

Do you know of a workaround?

[christopher]

Hi @bartenderonduty,

mmm… I need to do more investigation on the first paragraph problem and get back to you.

Regarding the other question, the default H1 tag is what the title shows using the theme itself and you customized the theme by adding the CSS code below to hide that default title:

.single-post .entry-title{
    display:none;
}

This is a customization request which is outside of our support scope. We will do our best to show you how to do the customization but the actual implementation will be on your shoulders.

Please kindly follow the steps below:

1. Install the X Chid Theme. (You already installed and activated this)
2. Copy the file below:
   wp-content/themes/x/framework/views/integrity/_content-post-header.php
   to:
   wp-content/themes/x-child/framework/views/integrity/_content-post-header.php

You need to create the necessary folders in your Child Theme.

3. Change line 13 from <h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1> to whatever you like.

Thank you.

[bartenderonduty]

Thank you for the response and guidance Christopher. I will look forward to your thoughts on the first paragraph problem.

[rad]

Hi @bartenderonduty,

Upon investigation, the keyphrase issue back, I checked the fix and it still implemented which I assume it’s due to Yoast plugin changes on its feature that affects the existing Yoast integration of the builder. We’ll investigate this and provide fix in the future updates.

The temporary solution is using a classic text element as it works there. Please note that Keyphrase in introduction is added within paragraph, not on the headline (hence paragraph). And it’ Yoast standard, hence, the keyphrase added to headlines will not fix it since it requires paragraph (<p><p>), simply as text

Thanks!

[bartenderonduty]

Thank you for looking into these issues. I have hundreds of pages on my sites that use the newer text element, so manually changing all of those to use the classic text element isn’t possible. Hopefully you can implement a fix in the near future.

[rad]

You’re most welcome! Just letting you know that this issue has no effect on actual SEO data that being seen by search engines. The tool only use it to help user visualize and score it without a need for actual search engine. Thanks!