Yoast says it is working on a fix for a duplicate sitemap bug within its plugin for WordPress after a marketer discovered the issue and tweeted about it on Monday.
Creating sitemaps is an important aspect of technical SEO, as they inform Google’s crawlers about the most important pages on a website and help to create a robust structure and hierarchy.
That task is being made slightly more difficult at the moment with Yoast’s SEO plugin, as it is automatically creating duplicate sitemaps rather than just a single one for pages and posts.
The good news is that Yoast is already aware of the problem and is working on a fix, though there is no estimated time frame for when an update will be rolled out.
Yoast’s Jono Alderson advised the marketer who flagged the issue that the “easiest fix” at the moment is to set up a redirect from the duplicate to the original for each post and page sitemap affected.
However, what is more surprising is that the bug is also present in several other SEO plugins, which suggests it might be linked to the open source licence within WordPress.
The three other tools currently affected by the issue are the Rank Math SEO plugin, the All in One SEO WordPress SEO plugin and the SEOPress WordPress SEO plugin.
Yoast is one of the most widely used SEO plugins, with around 5 million active installations, so while it is only a small issue, it is still undermining the efforts of scores of webmasters to optimise for search.
Mistakes like this can also accumulate, especially if there are issues elsewhere on a site, so SEOs will be hoping that a quick fix will be on its way soon.
