Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack are the two of the leading best SEO plugins for WordPress. However, many people wonder which one is better?
When new to SEO, you may be wondering which is the best plugin to install for your WordPress blog. Others may have been using one of these plugins and wondering if it is the best option.
Which is more popular – Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack
Winner: Yoast
All in one SEO pack vs Yoast SEO in WordPress.org
If a WordPress plugin is more popular, there is often a correlation with how good that plugin is. This is not always the case, but it is worth taking a look at.
On the download section, it looks like Yoast has more reviews, although it doesn’t say much about the difference in active installs or downloads. It just says there are 1+ million active installs.
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However, if you look at the reviews, it looks like Yoast SEO is the clear winner. If that is any indiction of how many people choose yoast over All in one SEO, then Yoast appears to be the winner.
Yoast Seo Vs All In One Pack in Google Trends
Also, if you look at the Google Trends data, it also appears that terms associated with Yoast are significantly more popular than the All in one SEO pack keywords:
This makes sense, as when I was newer to WordPress and SEO, I kept hearing people talking about the Yoast SEO plugin more so than the All in one plugin.
Which has better SEO functionality – the difference between All in One SEO vs Yoast SEO
Both of these SEO plugins for WordPress are great for beginners. Both are very decent plugins out of the box, without any further change of settings. Yoast is probably better out of the box for a few reasons. So if you are a beginner, you might want to go with Yoast.
But what about advanced settings on Yoast or All in One? That’s what I’ll dig into. I’m not going to do a simple review of these two SEO plugins. There are many other posts out there doing a simple side by side comparison of these two plugins.
That would take too long, and honestly, these plugins do many of the same things. The difference is how they are laid out, what options are set up by default and how advanced you can get with each plugin.
In this post, I will compare Yoast SEO with All in one SEO pack from the standpoint of what Advanced SEO settings I recommend, and if both plugins can achieve the recommended advanced settings.
Index vs. Noindex of categories?
Winner: Depends, I say Yoast
Should you noindex or index your category pages? This can be a controversial topic between SEOs. My opinion is that you should typically index these.
This choice can have a dramatic effect on your traffic of your blog, but the correct choice on whether you should noindex or index your category pages can depend on the situation at hand (your website).
- Yoast SEO: Category pages are index by default
- All in one SEO: Category pages are noindex by default
Since they both have different default settings, you should consider which is right for your blog. You can also test different settings to see which is best for your circumstance.
Since beginners may not be able to make an educated decision on this, and because they likely won’t tinker with the default settings, Yoast is the clear winner for beginners.
Index vs Noindex of Tags?
Winner: Tie
Most SEOs are in agreement on this one. You should noindex tags in WordPress. However, if your site is already established, you might loose some traffic. It is better to noindex the tags on a new blog.
How to noindex tags in Yoast
Under Titles and Metas>Taxonomies, you can to noindex Tags in Yoast:
How to noindex tags in All in one SEO Pack
Under general settings you can noindex tag archives:
Sitewide Meta: Noindex of Subpages of archives
Winner: Yoast SEO
I recommended to noindex your subpages of archives, and with Yoast its easy. I checked All in one SEO pack, but I don’t believe you can do this with all in one (correct me if I am wrong).
How to Noindex subpages of archives in Yoast
This can be done in Yoast by going to Titles & Metas>Other>Subpages of archives (click to highlight noindex)
Paginated content: Adding rel=”next” & rel=”prev” for Paginated Archives
Winner: Yoast SEO
Google recently posted a solution to the common pagination issue. Yoast SEO plugin has recently addressed this issue by making it default in their plugin
…suffice to say our Yoast SEO plugin takes care of all the needed changes automatically.
What it does is add this code:
In All in one SEO, you can have an option of No Pagination for Canonical URLs, as explained in All In One SEO’s Documentation:
No Pagination for Canonical URLs
This option was added for those users who want to remove the pagination from Canonical URLs. Typically the Canonical URL for a paginated page or post will be displayed at http://mydomain.com/page/2/. This option removes the /page/2/ from the Canonical URL.
However, it doesn’t appear that All in one SEO addresses the issue like Yoast does, so Yoast is the winner for this advanced issue in SEO and WordPress.
Noindex media
Winner: Tie
It is typically recommended to noindex your media. When you upload an image, WordPress creates a page for each image. You don’t want to have google index these pages unless you have a particular need to do so (such as maybe you have a photography site). Don’t worry; this won’t affect the indexation of images in Google images.
You can do this very easily with both Yoast and All in one SEO.
How to noindex media in Yoast
Under Titles and Metas>Post Types, you can to noindex media in Yoast:
How to noindex media in All in one SEO Pack
Under general settings you can noindex media in All in one SEO:
Noindex or Disable Author & Date Archives
Winner: Yoast
If you are a one-person blog, there is no need for an author archive. You can disable them or noindex them in Yoast. With SEO all in one plugin, you can only noindex them.
Also if you don’t want the Date based archives, then you can likewise disable them or noindex with Yoast SEO. With All in one SEO pack, you can only noindex them.
How to Noindex or Disable Author and Date Archives in Yoast SEO
To do noindex these archives in all in one SEO, its under general settings. To do this in yoast SEO, head over to Titles & meta>Archives:
Custom Sitemap
Winner: Tie
If you chose to noindex any of the previous items I recommended, you would also want to exclude these in your sitemap. In Yoast, you can go to the sitemap section to exclude particular taxonomies from your sitemap (like tags).
It’s worth noting that neither plugin has an automatic HTML sitemap creation functionality, which would be nice. I like to have both an XML sitemap for the search engines and an HTML sitemap in the footer for users (and search engines).
There is a nice little plugin that does this if you wanted to add an HTML sitemap to WordPress, which pairs nicely with Yoast’s XML sitemap.
How to customize your sitemap in Yoast SEO
Before you do this, you want to make sure you don’t have any other plugins that also create a sitemap.
How to customize your sitemap in All in one SEO
All in one SEO pack does not have the sitemap functionality by default. You have to to to the feature manager, then activate the sitemap functionality. Once activated, you can do the same things as Yoast.
Conclusion – Yoast is the winner for Beginners and Advanced Users
Because all in one SEO pack automatically adds noindex to your category pages, I am just not sure this is the best default option for beginners. For advanced users, you can just change it to meet your purposes. I like that Yoast indexes the category pages by default.
Also, since Yoast has some more advanced handling of pagination and some other things, I think that Yoast is the superior choice for advanced SEOs as well.
With that said, there are some other cool features that All in One SEO has, such as a bad bot blocker, a performance section, and a couple of other things that Yoast SEO doesn’t have. Overall, I’d say that Yoast is a better SEO plugin for WordPress, but they are pretty close.
If you are a perfectionist with your SEO, choose Yoast. After all, it is the more popular plugin, and will probably continue receiving development for it in the long run, so you don’t have to worry about an abandoned plugin.
Not to say that All in one will become abandoned in the future, I’m just saying there is less of a chance for a plugin to become abandoned, the more popular it is. Both are very popular plugins, so you probably won’t have this issue.