Switching from Yoast to Rankmath, seeking advice on illogical SEO ranking.

Because Yoast still fails to provide the ability to offer a self-referencing canonical tag in a paginated blog, we find ourselves compelled to switch from the SEO plugin.

A switch to Rankmath would solve this. Now, we have Rankmath running on one of our small websites, and I see all sorts of illogical SEO settings that greatly deter me:

• The words in the keyphrase must follow each other and be exact, while Google no longer evaluates this way.
• The minimum word count of 600 is also completely outdated and very niche-dependent. There are blogs with 30 words ranking first in various niches.
• When you meet that hard keyphrase requirement of consecutive words in the title, the post is immediately rewarded with a 40% boost. Even if the meaning of that keyphrase makes no sense, it gets a 40% boost.

No one needs to explain to me that you don't write for such an SEO tool but for the visitor. No one needs to explain to me that there is no change at the front end of the post for both the visitor and Google when you switch from a green Yoast dot to 50% Rankmath; I understand that very well. These tools are merely guidelines to mold your post to be Google-friendly but essentially have no correlation with the actual algorithm.

My point is... these kinds of restrictions are so far from the reality of the Google algorithm, how can such a tool be taken seriously when it comes to any other, deeper SEO advice?

I read everywhere about rave reviews that don't quell my suspicion, and on forums where others raise this issue, everyone comes back with the cliché response: "don't write for the tool," but that completely reverses the reasoning.

How is it that an advanced and reliable SEO tool is so far removed from everyday reality, and what does this say about the other functionalities of that tool?

With this topic, I'm looking for insights that I might be overlooking. Perhaps someone does have a solution for the 'self-referencing canonical tag in a paginated blog' with Yoast. Maybe someone knows something entirely different that we haven't considered at all.

Thanks for your attention!

RuuddeKoster said:

My point is... these kinds of restrictions are so far from the reality of the Google algorithm, how can such a tool be taken seriously when it comes to any other, deeper SEO advice?

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experienced SEOs know how to rank and bank without any of these tools, these tools are useful for beginners. If you're experienced and know how to optimize your content you can disregard the advice that these tools give, and focus on the important things (site speed and user friendliness, crawlability and indexation, topical authority, basic optimization tips like image ALT tags, LSI terms and SEO entities, schemas, etc)

RuuddeKoster said:

How is it that an advanced and reliable SEO tool is so far removed from everyday reality,

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probably they can't keep with google's idiotic and frequent updates. That would be my guess, but I don't know for sure, so don't quote me on this

RuuddeKoster said:

and what does this say about the other functionalities of that tool?

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I'm not siding with RM, but I'm pretty sure that it does have some useful functionalities, otherwise I don't see how they're still in business...

RuuddeKoster said:

With this topic, I'm looking for insights that I might be overlooking. Perhaps someone does have a solution for the 'self-referencing canonical tag in a paginated blog' with Yoast. Maybe someone knows something entirely different that we haven't considered at all.

Click to expand...

can't help you with this I'm afraid (I've stopped caring about SEO and google's shenanigans a while ago), but hopefully someone else can chime in...