Yoast SEO ability reference

What Yoast SEO needs before these load

2 of the 10 also ship in GoBuildWP Free 1.18.6 under the same names, marked “Also in GoBuildWP Free” below. They need no GoBuildWP Pro licence, but each retains its own dependency, feature and permission checks. Where Free's copy does less, its own description follows Pro's. When Pro's richer copy passes its gates, it registers first and answers.

Yoast SEO 21.0 or newer must be active. The module's gate reads the WPSEO_VERSION constant and compares it with that floor, so an older Yoast leaves every call unregistered. The four redirect calls also need Yoast SEO Premium: they register when WPSEO_PREMIUM_VERSION is defined, and check again for Yoast's redirect manager when called, answering yoast_redirects_unavailable if it is gone. Every call uses GoBuildWP's own permission check, which means manage_options (super admin on multisite). A call made after Yoast is deactivated returns yoast_not_active. Free's copies of the post get and edit are limited to the SEO title, meta description and robots, and check edit_posts plus the right to edit that post instead of manage_options.

Minimum (base)

21.0 WPPILOT_PRO_YOAST_MIN_VERSION

Yoast SEO editions

free, pro

Agent skills shipped

yoast-integration

Where Yoast keeps post SEO and term SEO

A post's SEO is post meta under the _yoast_wpseo_ prefix, read and written through Yoast's WPSEO_Meta class rather than raw meta calls. That class slashes values itself before saving, so the module deliberately does not slash them again; a description or canonical containing a backslash is stored once, not doubled. The primary category is the exception, written straight to _yoast_wpseo_primary_category, and sending null removes it.

Terms work differently. Yoast stores the SEO of every category, tag and custom term in one site-wide option, wpseo_taxonomy_meta, through WPSEO_Taxonomy_Meta. A term edit reads that term's complete current array, lays the requested fields over it and writes the whole set back, so the fields you did not send keep their values.

The noindex codes, translated

Yoast stores a post's index setting in meta-robots-noindex as 0 for the post type default, 2 for index and 1 for noindex. The module reads and writes default, index and noindex instead, plus follow or nofollow, and does the mapping both ways. The advanced list accepts noimageindex, noarchive and nosnippet; any other token found in stored data is left out of the read.

Everything in a request is validated before anything is saved. A malformed robots block returns yoast_invalid_robots and none of the other fields in the same call are written, so a rejected request never leaves half its changes behind.

Undo for fields, none for redirects

Post edits take a before-image of the post and restore with wppilot/rollback-change. Term edits restore by putting the wpseo_taxonomy_meta option back as it was. That one option holds the SEO fields of every term, so rolling back a term edit also discards any term SEO change made after it, by a person or another agent; on a busy site, check recent term edits before restoring. Redirect writes are logged as irreversible, because Premium also exports its redirects to a server redirect file and restoring the stored option alone would leave that file out of step.

Before creating or editing a redirect, the module repeats the error checks Yoast's own validator runs: no line breaks or control characters, no origin that normalises to an empty path, no redirect to itself, and no origin that already exists in either the plain or regex format, which returns yoast_redirect_exists with status 409. Listing returns up to 500 rows per page.

Representative call sequence

This sequence describes the documented calls and checks to perform. It is not a recorded result from an installed WordPress site. Inspect returned errors and partial results, then verify the saved values and affected output before proceeding.

Give a post a focus keyphrase and a new meta description, then take the change back after the editor objects.

1. 01 wppilot/yoast-get-post-seo Returns the post's current keyphrase, title, description and robots labels as the before state.
2. 02 wppilot/yoast-edit-post-seo Called with just focus_keyphrase and meta_description; the other fields are left alone and the full updated SEO block comes back.
3. 03 wppilot/rollback-change Given the change id from that edit, restores the post's Yoast meta to its earlier values.

Questions about Yoast SEO