CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wordpressyoast
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Reputation: 2633

Wordpress Yoast SEO , _yoast_wpseo_linkdex in postmeta

I am using wordpress plugin YOAST for SEO, I found out all the data is added to the table wp_postmeta . one of the meta key is "_yoast_wpseo_linkdex" , I am wondering what is the use of this key? can I remove it and will it affect the SEO post?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2526

Answers (1)

Optimizer
Optimizer

Reputation: 51

When I look at the source, while editing a page on one of my WP blogs that has the Yoast Plugin installed, I can see that the variable is being called by two separate files. The first being the page itself (post.php) and the second being a single JavaScript file it is calling (wp-post-scraper -341.min.js)

Let's look at some snippets from each to get a better idea. First from the JS file:

 function t(a, c, d) {
                var f = b("#yoast_wpseo_linkdex").val(), g = new E("#yoast_wpseo_focuskw_text_input", "get_focus_keyword_usage", wpseoPostScraperL10n, a);
                g.init(), c.initKeywordTabTemplate();
                var h = e(f);
                k(h), l(h), d.updateScore("keyword", h.className)
            }

and

YoastSEO.multiKeyword || (C.updateKeywordTab(a, F), j.updateScore("content", c.className), b("#yoast_wpseo_focuskw").val(F)), C.isMainKeyword(F) && (document.getElementById("yoast_wpseo_linkdex").value = a, "" === F && (c.className = "na", c.screenReaderText = A.i18n.dgettext("js-text-analysis", "Enter a focus keyword to calculate the SEO score"), c.fullText = A.i18n.dgettext("js-text-analysis", "Content optimization: Enter a focus keyword to calculate the SEO score")), C.updateKeywordTab(a, F), k(c), l(c), j.updateScore("keyword", c.className)), jQuery(window).trigger("YoastSEO:numericScore", a)

Now from the PHP file:

</tr><tr class="wpseo_hidden"><td colspan="2"><input type="hidden" id="yoast_wpseo_focuskw" name="yoast_wpseo_focuskw" value=""/><br /></td></tr><tr class="wpseo_hidden"><td colspan="2"><input type="hidden" id="yoast_wpseo_title" name="yoast_wpseo_title" value=""/><br /></td></tr><tr class="wpseo_hidden"><td colspan="2"><input type="hidden" id="yoast_wpseo_metadesc" name="yoast_wpseo_metadesc" value=""/><br /></td></tr><tr class="wpseo_hidden"><td colspan="2"><input type="hidden" id="yoast_wpseo_linkdex" name="yoast_wpseo_linkdex" value="0"/><br /></td></tr><tr class="wpseo_hidden"><td colspan="2"><input type="hidden" id="yoast_wpseo_content_score" name="yoast_wpseo_content_score" value="0"/><br /></td></tr>

and

<input type="hidden" id="yoast_wpseo_linkdex" name="yoast_wpseo_linkdex" value="-1329">

I'd argue that the last line is the most revealing. Especially the negative value appended to the end, for this particular post.

What it seems to be doing is scraping the page and then determining (by some sort of scoring algorithm) how many points to remove for the number and type of links on the page. Remember links can be of the type "follow" or "no-follow" and can link to other sites or your own. That gives the algorithm four possible flavors of links to work with when figuring how much to decrement your score.

All this, it would seem gets rolled into their handy [red light, yellow light, green light] proprietary ranking system.

To answer your question regarding deleting it. Unless it throws some sort of error which affects the way your page loads/displays, it is just an abstract measure which Yoast utilized to indicate to you how well optimized a post is for SEO purposes, the value of the variable had no direct effect on the actual SEO ranking factors of the page from a search engine's point of view.

Upvotes: 5

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