BuddyPress / Yoast conflict

[msteimann]

BuddyPress setup works by creating two blank pages – members and groups. If I type in a meta description in Yoast for both and preview the pages, the description text is added to the page header and gets properly displayed in the page source text.

But as soon as I assign the two pages to the BuddyPress plugin, the description gets stripped completely. In the page source appears an author note saying that a description needs to be added.

Yoast settings „noindex, nofollow“ are stripped, too.

The BBpress Forum page is not affected by this issue. Yoast can apply a meta description and the „noindex, nofollow“ command.

This issue has been confirmed by a Yoast developer:

​https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/12435#issuecomment-479479079

[Venutius]

The forum thread for this is ​https://buddypress.org/support/topic/severe-buddypress-yoast-conflict/

This seems to be pretty fundamental to the way BuddyPress works in that BP is based on template redirects. Maybe one way to fix is to add the ability to nofoloow etc. into to BP itself?

[imath]

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback @msteimann.

The issue here must be caused by how our BP theme compat work : in short it resets the post global and changes the post ID to 0.

I agree we must work on a way to improve how BuddyPress integrates itself with the way WordPress set the pages according to their URL. There’s a ticket about it : #4954

bbPress is using WP Rewrites. But bbPress has a single root url, we have one for each directory component (Members, Groups, Activity,...) so it’s a bit more complex 😬

About including SEO featured in BuddyPress Core, I personally think it’s best to rely on plugins as their authors are experts on the subject.

[msteimann]

Thank you for reporting @imath.

Just to make sure I understood: There is not a lot the BP developers can do right now to resolve this issue, and the Yoast team (or other SEO Plugin developers) might find out how to fix it some day in the future?

Regards,
Martin

[imath]

@msteimann we need to improve things on our side to let SEO plugin developers improve SEO for BuddyPress.

Moreover their contributions are very welcome 😊

[msteimann]

Thanks @imath, good to know!