Things have changed.
With the recent update on Yoast SEO I saw a massive influx of users coming towards my plugin. I’ve read many complaints about Yoast SEO, its creator and his team. These comments are negative in nature, and meanwhile they lead them to The SEO Framework.
What can I say?
I believe I’m not in the position to comment on this. I’ve been avoiding mentioning Joost de Valk, his team and their plugin for quite some time now. However, as a fellow Dutchman and a free software programmer I do feel the need to express the following.
About The SEO Framework
The main reason I’ve created The SEO Framework is because I couldn’t find a clean plugin that did SEO apart from Genesis SEO. And I know SEO is important.
A few of my clients didn’t want to use Genesis (I insisted, really) and I had to expand the plugin to support other themes. This is where the plugin grew into what it has become now.
The way The SEO Framework is programmed is based on a different fundamental view on what team Yoast has.
Where it all started
Joost de Valk began programming his plugin long ago, I think he was one of the first to create a SEO plugin for WordPress. With this it grew as fast as WordPress has grown over time.
I think that their perspective, over time, for the Yoast SEO plugin (formerly WordPress SEO) is that it has become a commercial item. It has grown massively and people accepted the advertisements as long as the plugin helped their website’s SEO value.
The community isn’t all too fond about this, a good search within Google will reveal what people don’t like. Another search will reveal why it’s the best plugin.
Whereas The SEO Framework is a plugin based on what I wanted for my own websites, and when I put it online I felt the need and pride to update it and make it compatible with many plugins. I based every feature on what’s the best of all other SEO plugins. With the renowned Genesis layout to start with.
What makes the difference
I do not like ads, I do not like slow and overly-comprehensive plugins. I absolutely love clean layouts and easy to understand call to action buttons.
I’ve been using computers for over 20 years now and I absolutely understand what they do, why something is done, what works, and what doesn’t.
I’ve helped people who don’t even know what the “any key” does on a computer and I made every use of it clear to them.
I know what I do not like and I know what the general public doesn’t like.
I think this is what is reflected in the use and visuals of The SEO Framework.
At the end of the day, all SEO plugins do the same for your website:
Output SEO meta data based on options.
What I want to achieve
Of course, one plugin does it differently, is faster, is better to understand, has more features, more reliable, etc. than the other.
I try to get all the positives right for The SEO Framework. Although this might not be the case. I’m not the one to judge.
Mistakes happen
Mistakes happen, and I’ve made them too. I pushed an update through to the WordPress repository where all descriptions were the same for every page. I left out a very important check for a single variable. This made every post and page think it was a blog page.
Although on a very different scale, Yoast has made a mistake as well.
I do feel sorry for what has happened to Yoast SEO, its community, the negative thoughts about his team and its creator with the big change pushed through. And as mentioned on WP Tavern, it probably won’t happen again.
Nevertheless, I do feel the pride and enjoyment of many users making a switch towards my plugin, whom are looking for something new. I feel a great responsibility for not making the same mistakes others have.
I also do hope that The SEO Framework will one day be named “The Best SEO Plugin”. But I have a long way of “competing” to go through. I look forward to a great change on how plugins are being developed, on how new standards are being created, and I absolutely want to be part of WordPress’ future.
Joost de Valk did help WordPress become what it is today, I believe he and his team had a great positive influence on how some functionality has changed, for the better.
I just hope no negative attitude from a whole community will go against me.
You say, “… it probably won’t happen again”, and I say, “… you’re right, not until the next time”.
Remember, this is not the first time the plugin has caused these level of mayhem.
Four buggy releases in two days, is not exceptional for Yoast SEO. But it is unacceptable.
Personally I have never liked his oafish and arrogant attitude, so this was the last straw.
I have now taken his software of 60+ sites in the last few days and installed The SEO Framework.
Just doing my little bit to get you to your first million … 8^)
Hi Terence,
It’s good to see you here :)
Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the past releases from Yoast, because I haven’t experienced them. In fact, I’ve never used a SEO plugin other than Genesis’ built-in SEO and now my own.
I do however understand that the four releases were all buggy, and for a good reason:
As they were all targeted at different bugs, I think they wanted to seed out the most destructive bugs as soon as possible and later the less intrusive ones. This is actually common practice, it has unfortunately angered the community even more.
A small footnote: It’s very difficult to remain neutral in this situation as I’ve literally created and released a competing plugin.
I understand your desire to remain neutral.
And frankly, I wish I could take that position too.
Unfortunately, Jost has a long history of using his freemium users as unwitting beta testers.
And as I don’t see any difference now between the freemium code, and the Premium version ~ and my clients rightly blame me when the sites I manage for them have problems ~ the only logical thing to do is to ditch the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin altogether.
I am just very happy to know that you are there and doing such an competent job with SEO Framework.
Terence.
I used both Yoast SEO and AIOSEOP (with a little preference for the former one). This “big switch” gave me the opportunity to discover your plugin.
From a developer point-of-view (who makes custom devs/integrations and tailor-made themes for its customer, and sometimes also handles SEO optimizations/strategy ), I really appreciate your plugin.
I’ve installed it on a project website to evaluate if it could fit my need as a SEO plugin. And it was a real pleasure to discover the possibilities provided by the API. I allows to set-up fine grained configuration and control, and to code specific SEO behavior directly in the theme functions or template for specific elements, ex: custom post types, post-type archives, to use some custom field for SEO elements, or handle some specific elements differently from the common automations…
If I could make a suggestions for improvement, it would be on the documentation part.
Get a specific search feature for the documentation part (and not site-wide), add a index of the API features, for instance not only a sort by plugin’s version/time (as for “filters”).
I wish you the best.
Hi tof,
It’s great to hear you like the API!
Building the documentation around it is still something I need to get working on. When I first created the pages I didn’t think it would be expanded this much.
When looking at a lot of other API documentations from other software, I see there’s a lot to be improved on the one provided on this website. I’ll be sure to get to it, over time you’ll be able to notice improvements :). But it might take a while before I find the time to do so.
Hey Sybre,
Great plugin :) Keep up the good work.
For documentation search, I suggest Agolia DocSearch, a free instant search service :) Started using it from last week and it is super fast. Here is the link – https://community.algolia.com/docsearch
Hi Joel,
Thanks!
And that does look great! I’ll keep it in mind; however, I’ve actually already set up a whole infrastructure last week to tackle this issue :) This very network-website is part of that infrastructure already.
It will take a couple of months to have it all automated, but laying out the basics hopefully won’t take too long (as the API currently really is a mess).
Hi there,
I’m searching for a SEO plugin for my website and I’m wondering how you are comparing your solution with Yoast wordpress plugin. I mean do you supply same features or more which Yoast presenting.
I also wold like to know about support of multilingual wordpress sites which use WPML and/or Polylang plugins.
Thanks
Ozgur
Hi Ozgur,
The SEO Framework more or less supplies the same functionality as Yoast SEO has. In some area’s, it does less (like social image editing). And in other areas, it does more (like Schema.org markup).
The basics for SEO are extensively covered.
WPML is fully supported, and its support will be expanded in the next patch.
Polylang support is still building up, and I’m already working on it to for full support.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!
Have a great day! :)
Hello!
We have a problem with the other YSEO plugin wpml compatibility. A single sitemap is exported for the whole site. However, I think that sitemap per language is the better functionality….does your sitemap generator make sitemaps for each wpml language ?
Hello, sorry I was wrong about this. Sitemaps are also done for the language specific domains such as fi or sv.
What confused the issue is the English master sitemap includes everything in the site, also the language sites.
thanks, esa
Hi Esa,
That’s correct!
In the future I plan to have one sitemap per domain :). This is however a very specific feature targeted at a single plugin, so it’s not on the top of my priority list.
The one that’s currently available however does do the trick. If you require a more expanded sitemap, there are plenty good ones available within the plugin repository on WordPress.org :).
Have a great day!