About moving our high-traffic site from Yoast to RankMath

Hello,

I’m sorry to hear about the issues you are facing with your high-traffic, multilingual website that dropped in rankings due to Yoast’s errors. When transitioning from Yoast to Rank Math for such a website, there are a few key points to pay attention to:

1. SEO Settings Migration: Ensure that all your SEO settings, including metadata like SEO titles, descriptions, and key phrases, are properly migrated from Yoast to Rank Math. However, please note that some features like Schema Markup and Redirections will not be ported over during the migration process.

2. Schema Markup: If your website heavily relies on Schema Markup for SEO benefits, be aware that this feature will not be transferred during the migration. You may need to manually implement Schema Markup in Rank Math to maintain your website’s SEO-friendliness.

3. Redirections: Yoast SEO does not offer the same redirection features as Rank Math. If you have active redirections set up in Yoast, you may need to recreate them in Rank Math to ensure proper user experience and search engine visibility.

4. Sitemap Handling: When migrating to Rank Math, ensure that your sitemaps are properly configured for multilingual SEO. Rank Math automatically creates sitemaps for all your posts, including translated posts/pages. If you are using WPML for multilingual support, make sure that the hreflang tags are correctly set up to indicate translated versions of your content to search engines.

For more detailed guidance on handling sitemaps during the transition process, you can refer to our knowledge base article on Multilingual SEO with Rank Math SEO & WPML.

If you encounter any specific issues or need further assistance during the transition, feel free to reach out to our support team directly here. We’ll be happy to assist you further.

Thank you for raising these concerns, and we appreciate your trust in Rank Math for optimizing your website’s SEO performance. Let me know if you need any more help!

Sources:
How to Migrate from Rank Math to Yoast » Rank Math
Multilingual SEO with Rank Math SEO & WPML » Rank Math
Why Rank Math Is Better Than Yoast » Rank Math

Hello,

Thank you for your patience.

Rank Math does not generate sitemaps for the URLs that are translated by GTranslate. This is because GTranslate does not create actual pages for each language, but rather translates them on the fly when a visitor requests them.

But this does not really affect your SEO performance. Multilingual plugins add a special tag called hreflang to your pages, which tells Google and other search engines what language and region your page is targeting. This way, Google can find and index your translated URLs from the hreflang tag, and show them to the relevant users.

If you want to have more control over your multilingual sitemaps, you can also try WPML, TranslatePress, or Weglot as these plugins are fully compatible with Rank Math.

Hope that helps.