I’m a fan of the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin. I’m also a fan of the Yoast SEO Plugin. Both have been very helpful on multiple occasions. But … on all of my sites Health Check is suddenly giving me a “Critical” – and, it turns out, fake – SEO error: “Your site cannot be found by search engine”; “This was reported by the Yoast SEO plugin”.
It directs me to Ryte.com, apparently run by Yoast, which demands an uncomfortable amount of personal information (all added to the Yoast spam-me-forever database?), then promises to email me a report – but days later I still haven’t gotten a report. I am certain that my sites are in fact being found, crawled, and indexed by search engines. This all seems suspiciously scammy and not at all what I would expect from the wonderful people at WordPress.org. At first I thought it might be an ill-conceived April fool joke.
What is Yoast playing at?
Update: The fake error has been downgraded from “Critical issue” to “Recommended improvement”. But it is still there, and still directs me to the scammy Ryte site.
Update: (2020-04-30) Yoast seems to be at it again – spamming/scamming that is. After a plugin update I now get this obnoxious notice in my Admin Dashboard. No matter how many times I click “hide this notice”, the spammy/scammy notice remains stubbornly in place.
I posted this – politely, I think – to the plugin’s official support page. One day later – no response. In desperation I tried clicking “Click here to speed up your site” … and … nothing happened. Clicked repeatedly. Nothing happened. No idea what Yoast is playing at.
