Avoid All in One SEO Plugin - The Website and SEO Destroyer

I will start by saying I'm not too big a fan of Yoast and their aggressive advertisements and apparently dodgy paid SEO services, but at least their plugin doesn't destroy your website's rankings. And when they do have an issue, such as they did a couple years back with media attachments, it was resolved quickly.

On the other hand, we have All in One SEO...

Back in 2017, AIOSEO released a version of the plugin that was incompatible with certain popular versions of php at the time (e.g. php 5.4, 5.6, etc), resulting in websites being completely bricked (white screen of death). And the only way to fix this was to remotely access the site (e.g. FTP) and to delete the plugin and then install either the prior version or the new version (when the developer got around to updating it).

Personally, I had a website that was earning a lot of money that's rankings completely tanked from this and never really recovered. It was a set and forget affiliate website that just worked, and therefore didn't require me actively working on it, so I didn't notice until a week or so later when it tanked and was too late.

About a year or so ago, AIOSEO was acquired by a new company (Awesome Motive), so you might think the new developers would be more careful. Nope.

I've now noticed on the remaining sites that still had AIOSEO, that during a recent update they forced SERP titles to a maximum of 60 chars, despite plugins like Yoast and most importantly Google allowing for more characters. What I mean by forced is that rather than just a warning message recommending user to use 60 chars, the plugin will instead actually remove your SERP title if it exceeds 60 chars and replace it with the default page title. And this happens despite the fact that the SERP title was already working with previous versions of AISEO and was listed perfectly fine in Google as is.

Plugins like Yoast or really anyone who would make an SEO plugin with any level of competency for SEO, give their user's SERP Titles a recommended character limit, and if they exceed that limit simply allow it to remain and be truncated by Google -- they do not automatically alter it, which is absolutely effing moronic.

As you can imagine, this has messed up all of my SERP Titles that exceeded 60 chars, even though they were fully displayed in Google and ranking.

Some people were complaining about their sites tanking from this plugin, and this is the reason why.

Some examples:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/...-descriptions/

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/my-position-in-serps-completely-collapsed-after-major-aioseo-upgrade/[/URL]

Also, looking around:

• This year an AIOSEO update automatically turned on users automatic updates without warning, causing massive issues as you can imagine: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/...cklash/391607/
  
• Last year the AIOSEO plugin had a big vulnerability as a vector for malicious attacks: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2020/...-one-seo-pack/
  
• SEO plugins don't really do much, but AISEO has managed to eff up over again in the most consequential ways possible for an SEO plugin: bricking your site, altering SERP titles, automatically forcing automatic updates, and a major security exploit.

I just want to warn everyone to avoid this plugin, as it clearly has a thing for incompetent developers, and I have little doubt there will be another problem down the road.