Categories for META keywords creates unremovable duplicates All in One SEO Pack Troubleshooting Forum

[AIO SEO 1.6.2]

I ticked the Categories for META keywords option a couple of weeks ago, and have left it on since.

The idea behind this concept is fine. However, what happens is that AIO SEO seems to forget completely about checking for duplicates. It seems to just add the post's WP keywords + WP tags to the SEO tags that the author has already entered (or adds later).

The result is that a lot of duplicated keywords are being sent to the search engines. I found out this today, while trying to understand the mystery of why a vitally important blog page had not been indexed by Google.

My guess was that Google does not appreciate duplicates of anything. So I decided to try to remove the duplicates. However, this was impossible! I unticked the "Categories for META keywords option"and re-saved the AIO SEO options. Then, I re-saved the post itself, displayed it and looked at its source. All the duplicate keywords were still there.

Finally, I had a look at my sitemap.xml file. By re-saving the post, the sitemap had also been re-saved. However, sitemap.xml had not recorded any change in the post. Actually, it had not recorded changes in any posts – in spite of such a  fundamental change having been made in AIO SEO's options. Potentially, this change would affecta lot of pages…

I do not know what is worst of these two issues:

1) AIO SEO creating duplicate tags and Google (possibly) avoiding the pages

2) AIO SEO's failure to remove the duplicates it has previously added

I guess both issues would need to be addressed. Actually, there is even a third need:

3) AIO SEO should probably have had some sort of flush or mass update function. When important changes in the setup are being saved (like the issue in question and many of the other options), it should probably promptly update all posts and pages, etc., in such a way that the sitemap.xml would pick it up as page changes.

3b) By afterthough, AIO SEO should probably ask for confirmation before mass updating.

If you would please look into this issue, I would be very grateful.

Best regards,

Kristoffer L

Actually, in spite of deleting cache files and overriding cache when reloading the file, unchecking this option did not remove my duplicates. It did not even stop adding new post tags/categories to SEO meta tags. Neither did it remove the existing post tags/categories from the SEO meta tags. The option being off did not seem to "take", whatever I did to make it so.

As far as I know, there is no cache running at the server side, either (no cache plugin, no cache setup in .htaccess).

I finally found a manual workaround:

1) Manually delete all the post's tags and categories

2) Manually delete all SEO Meta tags

3) Re-save the post.

Now, the Meta tags were blank (confirmed). Then, I rebuilt them:

1) Re-entered the post's tags and categories

2) Re-entered SEO Meta tags, but manually stripping out duplicates.

3) Re-saved the post

This finally solved the problem. However, I am not looking forward to doing this for every post…

— Kristoffer