When our clients sign on with us, they are stating that they trust us with their branding, website, and marketing strategy. We do our very best to make sure everything runs smoothly, but sometimes things happen that are out of our control.
Recently, Yoast – a widely used WordPress Plugin for SEO – pushed an update live that included a bug that caused a significant drop in search engine ranking for many websites across the web.
What Is Yoast?
Yoast, founded in 2010, is currently considered one of the most comprehensive search engine optimization software platforms available for WordPress. The Yoast software is said to run on more than 4 million websites and on 9.5% of the top 1 million websites in the world.
Yoast is currently headquartered in the Netherlands and they have around 80+ team members on staff. In addition to their WordPress plugin, Yoast offers online courses in SEO and have a blog that is geared those who are interested in learning more about SEO.
A Breakdown of What Happened
After we noticed the Yoast bug, we dug deep into our client list to better understand the impact. 40% of our clients were affected by this – and that was not a fun thing to report to our clients. We had to include a note in their monthly report explaining why their traffic unexpectedly plummeted – but they shouldn’t worry because Yoast promptly released a new update to fix the issue.
The Founder of Yoast, Joost de Valk, sent an announcement with a personal apology along with the update that read:
“This post serves both as a warning and an apology. …We’re so very sorry. …we messed up. I myself, am sorry. More so than normal, because I came up with and coded this change myself…”
We appreciate Yoast’s professionalism in handling this situation and transparency in how they plan to prevent similar recurrences in the future. Luckily things have been looking up since Yoast released the latest update and we have already seen an improvement in our client’s rankings. We look forward to reporting this on our next end-of-month reports.
Ultimately, we plan to continue using this tool – because as a marketing agency, we understand that unexpected things happen – and Yoast is a solid SEO tool. You never know what is going to happen in any given day.
How We Use Yoast For Our Clients
We use the Yoast plugin to help optimize our client’s websites and blog posts to the fullest. This tool is extremely useful to us and provides a checklist of SEO items for each blog post in order to optimize them for the greatest reach.
This checking has also helped us show our new interns everything that that needs to be done in order to optimize a website!
What’s Next
Not everyone was affected by the Yoast bug, but if you are uncertain about whether your website was affected or not, contact us today. Our team is more than happy to look into this issue for you and discuss your current SEO plan.
