Rank Math
Rank Math.
Until recently, if someone asked me about an SEO tool for WordPress, I would always have recommended Yoast. A few days ago, however, I came across the Rank Math plugin in an article about must-have plugins.
Since the plugin was highly praised there, I installed it on a test site and was pleasantly surprised: I like it.
The design alone is very appealing—but of course, that’s only half the battle.
Import from Yoast
If Rank Math detects during installation that Yoast is already installed, the plugin offers an import option. In my test, all of Yoast’s settings were imported without any issues. Keywords and excerpts were all there. So, at least for my 200 test posts, there was no problem in this regard.
By the way:
The free version of Rank Math allows you to use up to 5 keywords per post.
More Features
The other features are also impressive. For example, you can trigger immediate indexing by search engines and, as a bonus, edit the robots.txt and .htaccess files right from within the program. More on the .htaccess file below, since I ran into a problem with it.
I find the information presented under the SEO analysis particularly interesting. There, you’ll find several starting points for improving your SEO ranking.
By the way, your posts will be rated significantly better by Rank Math if they contain both internal and external links.
This non-exhaustive list is rounded out by the ability to monitor pages that can't be found (404 Monitor) and set up corresponding redirects right away.
This feature is worth its weight in gold to me, since I’ve just “moved over” from another system.
By the way: I’m using the free version of the plugin. That’s more than enough for me right now.
Problems
If you look at the posts after installation, you’ll see that their SEO ranking is listed as N/A. This is simply because the post is opened and saved once for analysis. Simply clicking “Refresh” in the open post is enough to fix this, but it can cause “confusion” for search engines. It’s best to use the suggestions provided by the plugin right away to improve the post.
Htaccess
When my cache (WP Rocket) is enabled, I experience the following behavior:
Saving the “General Settings” results in a “501 – not implemented” error. As a workaround, deactivate WP Rocket, save the desired settings, and then reactivate the caching plugin.
I was able to narrow down the problem to the “Edit .htaccess” section in the General Settings.
To fix this, simply hide the entire block.
To do this, lines 80–91 in the “class-option-center.php” file must be commented out or deleted. Before doing so, please make a backup of the file and be aware that this setting will need to be reapplied after a plugin update.
In all other parts of the plugin, saving works fine—as I mentioned, this only happens for me in the “General Settings.”
Useful Links:
More articles on CMS systems
The manufacturer's website.
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