[Resolved] Yoast SEO conflict

[Tina]

Hi everyone,
I apologise in advance because this is a bug that I unfortunately do not know how to reproduce and I don’t have a live site to show you, because every time it happened, it was on a client’s live site and had to be fixed asap. But I’m reaching out to hear if you have heard about this at all and maybe have information to share.

This is what happens:

• I have Generatepress Pro + Yoast SEO, all in latest versions.
• Randomly, without anyone touching/updating the site at all, page elements disappear.
• It seems to happen most on pages that have Generate Elements.
• For example, I have a page where I am displaying a custom content template via Generate Elements with a GP Query Loop. Suddenly, instead of the posts in the loop, there is a 404 error.
• Another example: Suddenly, the home page showed the WordPress default theme, no content and custom layout at all, even though that theme wasn’t activated. Activating/deactivating the themes, changing content on the page, didn’t have any effect at all, as if backend was suddenly de-coupled from frontend.
• In the last example, it actually happened while I was on vacation and I was the only one with login to the site at that time, so I know for a fact that it didn’t happen through some user action.
• Nothing in Debug log, no error messages, nothing.

In all these cases, it was an emergency and we had to quickly troubleshoot. I found out that a quick, but not permanent fix is to flush the permalinks by saving them in settings. Then, everything worked again, but the problem would re-appear randomly (e.g. in 2 weeks).

So I thought, what plugin has to do with permalinks, and found out that I could permanently prevent the bug from happening again by disabling Yoast SEO. Now everything is running smoothly.

Anybody ever heard of this? I like Yoast SEO, I would love to keep using it but it’s too risky for client websites at this point.

Best,
Tina

[David]

Hi there,

the theme doesn’t get involved with permalinks or messing with how core would handle them. So i am confident its not a theme conflict.

I had a look on Yoasts github. Theres been a few past issues that are related to the same problem.
This is the latest issue, i link to a recent reply that sounds like the issue you’re having:

https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/13383#issuecomment-1008762096

If you agree, you may want to comment on that git or get in touch with yoast support.

[Tina]

Hi David,

Thank you so much, that is good to know that it’s not connected to GP. I will take a closer look at the Github issue and contribute there.

Best,
Tina

[David]

You’re welcome, and i hope you get it resolved. Let us know!

[Author]

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