Rank Math is a free SEO plugin that was released only a year and half ago and during that time it has grown exponentially. One of the reasons contributing to its success are the incredible amount of options it offers for free, compared to others like Yoast SEO plugin that include them only in the premium version. And it’s not only simple features like previewing your title and description on social media like Facebook or Twitter: we’re talking about complex features like redirections or free Local SEO.

Let’s compare how good Rank Math is in terms of features against what is probably the most popular SEO plugin, Yoast SEO. Will it make sense to switch from Yoast to Rank Math?

1. Redirections
2. Social preview for Facebook posts or Twitter cards
3. Category and tag SEO
4. Image SEO
5. Local SEO

Rank Math vs Yoast: redirections

A URL redirection will send visitors and search engines to a URL that’s different than the one they attempted to visit. Some reasons why you might want to redirect include:

• you want to send visitors and search engines to a new site you’re starting
• your post previously had a long pretty permalink, you improved it thus changing the URL and now you need to send visitors and search engines to this new URL
• access to certain content of your site is temporarily unavailable and meanwhile you want to send your visitors to another area that might be interesting for them

The first two scenarios would benefit from a 301 permanent redirection. The third situation would be best served by a 302 found or even better, a 307 temporary redirection.

Rank Math allows you to perform all these redirections in its free version. You can adjust a general redirection for not found content and redirect it to the home page, to the default 404 page rendered by WordPress in conjunction with your theme, or setup a custom redirection to any URL. It also provides a box in the block inspector for you to setup a custom redirection for a the post.

While Yoast doesn’t offer this in the free version, it’s available in the premium version. The Redirect Manager in Yoast’s premium version has more perks compared to Rank Math’s free offering. For example, you can export/import your redirections and you can use regular expressions to redirect multiple URLs that match certain patterns.

#wordpress #plugin #seo