It is still in testing and nascent stage. There are lot of errors creeping up every day and the developers (mythemeshop) look cunningly honest. There is a Facebook group where you can join, to show your grievances.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/rankmathseopluginwordpress/

But as per the developers it was tested well, before releasing it into the WordPress repository. Then why do these bugs are creeping in still? The answer is that the product is not tested well and are just making naive users pay for their testing.

Update on 14th Mar 2019

author note to rank math seo plugin review 2019

According to the recent comment by the plugin owner, there have been new changes to Rank Math SEO Plugin. It says most of the problems are resolved and has a better experience.

[wp-review id=”4920″]

But I am comfortable with Yoast SEO and don’t want to experiment with the new features.

 

[wps_note size=”17″ background=”#fae588″ color=”#333333″ radius=”3″] Note : If anybody is interested in testing the new version and let me know how they feel, I can include their experience here.  BTW, I have stopped using MTS themes, as they are not much of SEO value. You can see the change on this site. [/wps_note]

The following are some of the issues.

1. The change-log is not updated for the recent version.
2. The 404 logs are showing other site details from the same server.
3. The developers themselves are using Yoast plugin on their site (Not sure).
4. Though Tags and Archives are no-indexed, they are still seen in Google (More information is required).
5. Decrease in Visitor traffic, are being shown in Google Analytics, after changing to Rank Math.

6. There is no direct importer from SEOPressor.
7. Unable to edit Home page with Rank Math.
8. Not working properly when using multiple phrases as focus keywords.
9. Activating and Reactivating Twitter tags from theme to Rank Math is a problem.
10. It imports data from Yoast, but you cannot do the reverse.

11. There are several ad messages in your dashboard, that your ranking will drop.
12. When you use Yoast, it asks it to deactivate saying that your SEO results will fall.
13. The “Redirection” plugin is deactivated, even when the “Redirection” module of this plugin is deactivated. You cannot import its data directly into this plugin. The regex expressions are not working properly
14. There are errors while using Gutenberg editor of WordPress 5.0 , because of PHP version.

These are some of my own experiences

15. AMP plugins are not fully supported by RankMath.
16. I had http errors while uploading images to WordPress. When I reverted back to Yoast, it worked properly.
17. The default setting are difficult to understand
18. We don’t know what modules to activate and which one to not.
19. It may not work properly will all the other themes of WordPress.

20. Once you use this plugin, going back to your old SEO plugin is difficult
21. If you revert back to Yoast, you need to manually copy the meta title and descriptions manually from Rank Math to Yoast again.
22. One of my sites lost some organic traffic and bounce rate, after using this plugin. It could be due to incorrect settings and enabling/disabling modules.
23. It has only SEO score metric. This when compared to Yoast results are different.

rank math seo error 2019

Today I received a reply from “Bhanu Ahluwalia” (owner of mythemeshop) over this review. Here are his comments on the issues I have mentioned before.

>The change-log is not updated for the recent version.
The changelog has been promptly updated: https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/#developers
It was not updated on a Facebook post and that is what the user you took reference from was talking about. With that said, it is not a bug and will have absolutely no effect on the working of the plugin.

> The 404 logs are showing other site details from the same server.
If you go through the comments of that Facebook post, you will notice that the user had caused this issue and accepts his mistake and says that the plugin didn’t cause this issue: https://www.facebook.com/groups/rankmathseopluginwordpress/permalink/279908009548199/

My Comments: I can’t expect new changelog for every few days. Within the last few weeks, I have seen umpteen number of updates, for few minor bugs. I think it is difficult to come up with all these changes. And these days, beginners of SEO do not see change logs all the time. So you have to make it someday a couple of weeks, where you are going to constantly and not quickly apply the changes.

>The developers themselves are using Yoast plugin on their site.
We absolutely are not. There is some issue with the WPThemeDetector website. They just assume we are using Yoast. If you check our website in BuiltWith which is much more sophisticated than WP ThemeDetector, you will notice that we are not using Yoast: https://builtwith.com/mythemeshop.com

> Though Tags and Archives are no-indexed, they are still seen in Google.
This is not possible. We have spent endless hours testing this. With users facing this problem, they simply don’t realize that they have made the archives index.

> “Drop-in” Visitors are being shown in Google Analytics
The users talking about this in our group are actually talking about a drop “in” visitors. As in, their traffic has dropped. This is because of Google’s algorithm changes in the last few weeks and the majority of the user websites are unaffected.

My Comments : If you are not using Yoast, then you also don’t say you are using Rank Math. Why is it? The site mentioned above was visited, but confused with the results. I didn’t understand which SEO plugin they were using.

There should be more clear explanation on tags and archives index in Google on their plugin page.

Yes, I misunderstood the “drop-in” term. But why would anybody change their working SEO plugin to a new one. Of course, to see improve in their rankings. If this plugin doesn’t counter-attack the Google changes, then what the fun in having a SEO plugin at all and change to a new one. And, then we are not sure whether its Google changes or plugin fault.

>There is no direct importer from SEOPressor.
We are just a few weeks old. We don’t have the resources to come up with ALL import tools so quickly. This supports the main 3 plugins for now (based on # of install) with support for more coming soon. Even Yoast or others don’t have all import options and an active example of this is they are ALSO missing an importer for the SEOPressor plugin and even Rank Math. More on this later.

My Comments: I think SEOPressor is a common SEO plugin used by many simple webmasters, who don’t know about SEO.  Then what will happen to all the old posts, if your site is big with 500 posts. Should I keep copying manually from them.

> Unable to edit Homepage with Rank Math.
This is not the case. Could you please try this on your website with ANY theme? It would be great if you could verify the issues before writing about them. If you find a single theme with this issue, we will definitely issue a fix within a few hours.

> Not working properly when using multiple phrases as focus keywords.
Again, is this something you found? Or did you just see someone else have this issue?

> Activating and Reactivating Twitter tags from theme to Rank Math is a problem.
ONE user faced this issue and it had nothing to do with Rank Math. It was something else that was causing this issue.

My Comments: I think any plugin, if you deactivate and reactive, should perform the same things. There should not be any difference in functionality. Even if its incompatibility with other plugins, it should be tested well before.

> It imports data from Yoast, but you cannot do the reverse.
That’s because Yoast has not come up with an importer yet. Please ask them to create an import tool for Rank Math.

>There are several ad messages in your dashboard, that your ranking will drop.
Could you please point out one? If you are using multiple SEO plugins at the same time, we recommend disabling the ones which could create a conflict with Rank Math.

My Comments. I definitely do not agree with this. Does Yoast pop-up these messages when you are shifting from one SEO plugin to another. They are just using this strategy to forcibly use Rank Math. The Rank Math was deactivated and copying the meta tags manually to Yoast for the new posts, and I see this message that ranking will drop.

There is no usage multiple plugins. I am just shifting from Rank Math back to Yoast, after deactivating Rank Math.

>When you use Yoast, it asks it to deactivate saying that your SEO results will fall.
Because that is the truth. Having two SEO plugins activated at the same time is just asking for trouble. You will end up with multiple canonical tags, multiple meta tags, etc. This will result in Google thinking that you are trying to spam their algos.

My Comments: This is not what it is happening. Yoast gets automatically deactivated. But along with it, it is asking to deactivate the “Redirection” plugin by John Godley. I don’t understand what “Redirection” plugin has to do with SEO.

The “Redirection” plugin is deactivated, even when the “Redirection” module of this plugin is deactivated. You cannot import its data directly into this plugin. The regex expressions are not working properly.
Our regex works differently than other plugins. I believe this is the same case with all redirection plugin. We follow a specific standard for our plugins and you are still free to keep using your old plugin if you do not want to try out new things. Also, the importing is working perfectly fine with the latest version, what issue did YOU face when using it?

My Comments: What is the fun in using plugins? It is because we install, check some settings and forget about it. Now how we are supposed to change the Yoast “regex” settings to “Rank Math” settings. If I need to use code again, then the functionality of Redirection plugin is not adhered to.

> There are errors while using Gutenberg editor of WordPress 5.0, because of PHP version.
Again, not the case. ONE user faced this and it was an issue because of Gutenberg + PHP. Not an issue of Rank Math + Gutenberg + PHP>

AMP plugins are not fully supported by RankMath.
Could you please mention which one? All the ones we support are working properly. We CANNOT support EVERY AMP plugin out there so we have stuck to supporting the most popular ones only.

My Comments: The “Accelerated Mobile Pages” plugin by  “Ahmed Kaludi, Mohammed Kaludi” has a setting for AMP pages where you can set the SEO plugin. It supports Yoast, but there is no option for Rank Math. That is what I meant. Rank Math is still in child stage. It still needs lot of testing and acceptance by other plugin users. Then we can accept it on development sites.

I had http errors while uploading images to WordPress. When I reverted back to Yoast, it worked properly.
Did you open a ticket about this? Could you please share a screenshot of the error?

My Comments: I can’t keep opening tickets for each and every error. Also there is no screenshot required for this error. It is a common error while uploading images. Either you get this error due to WordPress memory limit or Internet issue. Both these are working fine for me. When I shift from Rank Math, the error is resolved.

> The default setting are difficult to understand
Hmm, that is definitely your personal opinion. We have seen multiple users praise our easy to follow settings. With that said, we have a huge KB for the plugin here: https://mythemeshop.com/kb/product/wordpress-seo-plugin-rank-math/

> We don’t know what modules to activate and which one to not.
It is fairly simple. Activate the modules you want to use and deactivate the ones you don’t want to use.

> It may not work properly will all the other themes of WordPress.
It works with EVERY theme out there which follows the WordPress Codex. Please point out one where it isn’t working and I will show you where they are not following the WordPress Codex.

>Once you use this plugin, going back to your old SEO plugin is difficult
If other plugins didn’t have an importer, moving from Yoast to any other plugin would be difficult as well.

My Comments. If you don’t have importer from other plugins, then you should mention it on your WordPress plugin page. What if another error creeps up after 3 months. I would have posted 100 posts and then I cannot revert back.  Just-in-case, Yoast is also not without errors. Earlier there was an error with “Image redirection” settings and Yoast has accepted and mentioned the solution on their blog. https://yoast.com/media-attachment-urls/

> If you revert back to Yoast, you need to manually copy the meta title and descriptions manually from Rank Math to Yoast again.
Because they have not come up with an importer yet. That might be because they don’t have time to deal with import tools when they have more 1000 known issues pending: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues

One of my sites lost some organic traffic and bounce rate, after using this plugin. It could be due to incorrect settings and enabling/disabling modules.
We are always here if you have any confusions with the plugin. We offer premium level support even for this free plugin.

My Comments. If you have a dedicated support team, that is great. Lot of tickets and users think its wonderful. But what about the time involved. How much time does it take to create and wait for the solution. At least 2 to 3 hours. So if I have a bug every couple of days, do I need to spend so much time.

I use a SEO plugin to enable the standard settings and forget it for at least 6 months to 1 year. I don’t expect a new release every few days. If that’s the case, then the plugin is not tested well and you are using the naive WordPress users as your “Testing ground”.

> It has only SEO score metric. This when compared to Yoast results are different.
I am not sure how this counts as an issue. Our data is backed by research and if you consult any SEO they will tell you that following recommendations in our plugin will lead you to rank higher.

My Comments. I am not sure about this. But Yoast has two metrics. One for SEO score and other for Readability analysis. So if I don’t want to use the SEO score ( and I think it is not necessary every time to calculate and blindly believe in this metric), using Yoast can be helpful in “Readability” metrics.

Also for every new update, it takes some bandwidth resources to calculate the SEO score. This slows down the WordPress Dashboard operations. What about the old posts? How do I understand them differently from Yoast SEO score.

Final Comments from the Developer

I hope I have clarified some of the misconceptions and assumptions you have made about Rank Math. I request you to go through the comments of these so-called reported issues on the Facebook group so that you can come to know the truth about these issues.

Yes, I agree their support with premium themes and plugins is great. I personally am a member of their Schema, Adsense, Socially Viral themes and plugins like WP Review Pro etc.

The WP Review Pro plugin is used on many of my sites. I think that plugin is more tested and works well in comparison. It’s lightweight and has more functionality. The “Comparison table” feature lacks the premium features. It doesn’t have much designs and the look is not that great.

Rank Math SEO plugin is totally different. I thought it would be great and tested it out in beta stage itself. There are issues still creeping up, which is a no-no for me. (corrected by the author – see the above comments)

One feature I would like, is to revert back to important SEO plugins like Yoast and SEO Pressor, if I don’t like Rank Math.

It is the headache of their developers to contact those plugins and request an importer. I am a blogger, not a coder or WordPress plugin developer.

My purpose is to write content and leave the remaining settings to plugins. This is why WordPress is used widely by website masters. For big businesses, it is not that hard. For single bloggers and beginners it is a big headache. To go back to Yoast or any other SEO plugin, if they don’t like Rank Math, is not simply possible.

Updated on 19th Dec 2018

The positive side of the plugin is that, it includes several modules in one. You have a redirection module which had several simple bugs.

rank math seo bug 2019

Conclusion

In my honest opinion, I have used this plugin for 3 or more months on two sites. Both the sites had problems with wordpress dashboard speed loading. It took lot of time for any operations to complete.

The Yoast Free version is better and tested well. It is more authoritative and well-used by many websites. The developers (mythemeshop) are simply making users the scapegoats in their testing cycle.

It should have been tested thoroughly. I think in future, it may behave properly. This plugin coming from “marketing crazy” developers is not intended for live usage.

33 Comments

  1. From MyThemeShop, come different themes and plugins. Most of them are same, except a few changes. I feel Thesis and Genesis frameworks are still better for SEO point of view. Regarding Yoast, I feel it is still a well-tested SEO plugin.

  2. Rank Math is by far the best SEO plugin out there.

    1. @Robert. As I mentioned it is still in experimental stage and has some issues, compared to Yoast.

      1. Yeah but it also has features far superior to Yoast and features that Yoast lacks.

  3. You are absolutely right that Rank Math is going through a lot of issues, but gradually they have come up with all the fixes. This plugin is improving its features and fixing its bugs. Definitely, for an established blog, it will be a challenge to adopt Rank Math. But for new websites, I am sure it is good to try rank Math. They are seriously offering some awesome features as free of cost.

    1. yeah, I agree – the developments they’re making are awesome. plus their roadmap even shows that they’re planning to focus on bug fixes and put new features on hold until everything is working as intended: http://rankmath.com/roadmap

  4. Interesting that you delete all previous comment…. why suddenly change your review to positive and helping this spyware company?

    1. @Vlad: Thanks. To clarify, those were leading in wrong direction, instead of talking about the product. Rank Math has improved in the past few months and have mentioned only about that. Please comment in a proper manner, otherwise, your comments will be deleted.

  5. i’m using it in my web page for only 2 weeks but whats make me choose rank math is because the schema and keyword suggestion are awesome! I really hope Rank Math will solved all their problem as soon as posible

  6. Just curious if you had any thoughts about Seopress? It’s another somewhat new SEO plugin. I’ve been a long time user of Yoast Premium but it’s gotten quite bloated.

    1. @Adam: Thanks for the comment. I feel the free version of Yoast is still good. It is simple for the primary reason with not too many options. SEOPressor used to be good previously, but not heard about it anything special, recently. It helps in internal linking. Anyhow, SEO plugins alone do not help boost traffic. In 2019, user experience is more important.

  7. Jinliang Lin says:

    I don’t understand why Rank Math need to get permission to access Google Adsense information, but it is really disturbing .

  8. Awesome article. Please make one regarding seopress (NOT seopressor!) and if you can one about “The seo framework” too. I am choosing between those two and you seems like someone that can analyze them deeply!
    thanks

  9. I used RM, but for some reason the meta description disappeared and my ranking has dropped. I went back to Yoast and everything works well!

    1. @Oscar. That’s the difficulty with this new RM plugin. You need to manually import those meta descriptions again. If you have created new posts with RM with meta descriptors, then you need to copy them back to Yoast, if you change.

  10. Hi
    I come here to look for about Rank Math. I want to migrate to Yoast but I can’t because there’s no tool to move from rankmath to Yoast. Meanwhile I have a lot of posts.

    1. @Alip. I also faced the same problem. You can import from Yoast to Rank Math. But to do vice-versa, you have to do manually, until Yoast thinks otherwise.

  11. I thought I knew a few hours ago.
    I have imported from rankmath to allinseopack, then from allinseopack, I imported it to yoast.

    rankmath >> allinseo >> yoast

    and it’s done 🙂

    that’s because yoast doesn’t provide import from rankmath so I used the way above

    ok thanks anyway

  12. Tod Jones says:

    It’s been four months since you wrote this post and it clearly hasn’t been updated. At this point you’re just disparaging the plugin for no reason. Rank Math truly is an amazing plugin and there aren’t any bugs anymore – I use it on all of my client websites and have not run into a single issue.

    Criticism is fine as long as it’s accurate, I’m sure you wouldn’t appreciate it if you would launch a website or develop something and put hours into it only for people to talk about how bad it is for no reason. So why do that to the team over @ Rank Math?

    1. @Tod. Thanks for your comment. Each WordPress plugin has its own pros and cons. I just want a decent debate on this new plugin. Otherwise, I don’t have any benefit in criticizing or appraising it. As I mentioned in the post, if anybody comes with a case-study that shows proof that it does better than Yoast or any other SEO plugin, it would gather more claps. Otherwise, why would you unseat your existing SEO plugin for a new one without any extra benefit.

      It doesn’t matter how many work hours the team @Rank Math has put, since other plugin members are also working hard to bring good functionality. So better come with the pros in addition to the existing seo plugins and would benefit the WordPress community. BTW, I agree that the post is little old, but some of my remarks still hold.

  13. The CryptoStaunch says:

    I have been using RankMath for over few months now, and i will personally say that this plugin is great.

    It helped me in ranking my blog in the SERP as fast as possible. I will always recommend it to any other blog without fidgeting.

  14. I totally agree with this post… I should have read this before activating RankMath on my site. Organic visitors to my site dropped nearly 95% within 3 months of using. I mailed them several times but got only generic answers e.g. setting issue, google algo change etc.
    Now when I am planning to get back to Yoast, I have to update all posts manually!!!
    Can you please suggest any other way to do this?

  15. I was just about to give this new plugin a try until I saw where it says I need to give them authorization to my search console. That got all the alarm bells ringing in my head and I had to pause. It sure does look promising but like the author of this blog has said, I’ll wait to join later after I’ve confirmed that there wont be any issues to our site after using it.

  16. How the review option is built into Rank Math. Have detected an error with the structured data on woo commerce product pages using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
    itemReviewed- A value for the itemReviewed field is required.

  17. When I read this, I wonder what Rank Math is collecting and if this is actually all legal in Europe without telling this to my website visitors? Unfortunately this give me the idea to go back to Yoast.
    https://rankmath.com/privacy-policy/

  18. Hi,
    Thanks for the opinions – any chance of a refresh – all software needs to mature and wondering how these issues compare today.

    1. @Rodney. Due to time constraints I’m not able to update the Rank Math review. Lot of things have changed in the last year. I will soon update.

  19. Andy Laird says:

    I had serious issues when I installed RankMath! Google was indexing my image ‘alt’ tags, website title (which I had already un-checked) etc and not my page titles, meta description. My Google page rank dropped to Page 2! I requested support which was urgent on their own site and FaceBook. The FaceBook support was ‘pending approval’ and as I couldn’t wait anymore decided to remove the plugin and try The Framework. I re-submitted to google and within 24 hours my site was back. Finally after I complained again on FaceBook, my posts were finally published I was intimated by a member whose account was more than dubious! But seriously, I have no doubt a lot of work has gone into their plugin and bugs need to be ironed out but in the meantime I did’t want my google rank to suffer. People may look for something new but as a post above suggested SEO plugins such as Yoast has stood the test of time!

    1. @Andy: Thanks for your review comments on Rank Math. I have not tested this product for over an year now. The product owner has said that there have been lot of improvements. My first contention is that – a SEO plugin should never decrease your rankings, even if it cannot increase them. I still prefer Yoast as it has the required SEO features and does not clutter with different settings.

      The 3 main things I use in Yoast are –
      1. Meta Title
      2. Meta description
      3. Readibility analysis (if its green, its good for me).

  20. Came here for a technical review but all I found was someone that barely knows how wp or plugins work, ranting about in a conspiratious way about rank math with not a single screenshot or logfile. Read about half of it but what a waste of time. Now im forced to review all the code to have a real insight, i just installed the plugin yesterday on a staging server and i have not seen any of the issues here or on other blogs. We all probably caught in some indian drama.

    1. @WpDecade. Thanks for the comment. I wrote the review as a normal WordPress user. I am not a developer or coder. Just a common designer. You can see other comments where some people have felt that Rank Math had some problems for them. The main difficulty is it has too many options and difficult to migrate to another plugin required. You can post your review here, if you know more coding and think it has advantages. This is an open discussion for both the positives and negatives of the product.

  21. This is a nice review. Agree with you that RankMath need to be tested before using. Their code is extremely large and not really impressive.

    I also found Slim SEO, a small and well-coded plugin. Not really big with lots of features like RankMath, but I think it’s good enough to use.

  22. Great article.Thanks for your great information. The content are quite impressive.INK FOR ALL is my absolute top choice. I’ve noticed my productivity improve. The content optimization design is such a fresh take on content optimization, its offline mode makes sure I’m not distracted. I’m writing content faster.

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