Hey Y’all!
Today I am here to talk about a Yoast WordPress SEO: Permalinks issue that came up after the latest release. I know many of you use this plugin so I wanted to bring it to your attention too.
I use categories like crazy. I auto-build my menu system off of them! So today Diayll (who rocks y’all go check out her site) let me know that some of my category links were not working. Turns out about half of them scattered throughout my menu system were giving “404 not found”. That was concerning and I paniced a bit. However thanks to the super powers of google I found a fix that was a simple one so I decided to pass it on to y’all.
(NOTE: I do not claim to know how this will affect your SEO.)
First: You will need to be signed into your wordpress dashboard and navigate to your SEO Settings.
Second: In the WordPress SEO: Permalinks section check to see if the first two settings are checked. If they are they need to be unchecked. I am not sure if this is a default setting since mine were checked but it also could be something I did once upon a time that “broke” with this release. Either way, the second that I unchecked Strip the Category and Enforce a Trailing Slash the categories went back to working.
I am pretty sure that this broke because of my both my wordpress and SEO at the same time.
On a personal note: I am going to have to start checking my upgraded plugins more carefully especially after a wordpress upgrade.
Hopefully this will save some of you some googling time!
© 2012, Geeky Bloggers Book Blog.
I love helpful posts like this. I don’t need it because I’m on blogger but I always appreciate when people make posts like these because I can find it when I am desperately googling for solutions to my problem.
SEO makes my head spin. I have one of the plugins, but I don’t have it enabled because frankly, I’m scared of it. But I also really suck at SEO and need all the help I can get. I guess I should spend more time on it… ugh.
PS: Thanks for this article, though, because I am going to reference it!
Hi Felicia, Kevin Stacey here..
I want to first give credit where credit is due and compliment you on how detailed and structured your post is with the Yoast Category bug affection WP 3.4.1. I don’t see too many bloggers going into detail like you have to provide a solution…that’s the mark of a blogger who knows heir WordPress plugins.
For optimization, free plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast and even All in One SEO are really great as they lay down the basic SEO foundation for a WordPress site, but every blog is different and nothing works best for everyone.
I always suggest looking at a side-by-side comparison of the best seo plugins for WordPress in order to make an informed decision of what the best plugin is for that blogger and their website’s specific needs.
Here’s my most recent write-up on the subject:
WordPress SEO by Yoast vs All in One SEO vs SEO Ultimate
http://www.bestseopluginforwordpress.com/best-seo-plugin-for-wordpress-seo/wordpress-seo-by-yoast-vs-all-in-one-seo-vs-seo-ultimate/
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Great article btw…I’ll be referencing this post on my main blog.
I will check out your article! Thanks :)
*whispers* I seriously don’t even have any idea what the TITLE of this post means.
One of the wordpress plugins I use caused an issue with my categories yesterday.
Ha! I don’t even use that feature because I have no clue what it means. But thanks for sharing the fix. :)
It is a plugin that is supposed to “search optimize” your site for like google, yahoo, ect.
Thanks for the tips!
:)