The Grow by Mediavine WordPress plugin had a bug that interfered resulting in Yoast not outputting certain structured data elements. Some recipe sites experienced a lack of rankings because of this issue. Other sites maintained their rankings but lost the images from their Google rich results listing.
When a WordPress plugin causes an issue with another plugin, that’s called a conflict. That’s what happened in this case.
A conflict between the Grow Social Pro social sharing plugin caused issues with structured data, resulting in changes in how Google displayed the corresponding rich results.
MediaVine responded quickly and fixed the issue.
According to an email sent by Mediavine:
“If you are running our WordPress Grow plugin (formerly Social Pug) and updated to either version 2.12.1 or 2.12.2 in the past couple of days, please update your Grow plugin to 2.12.3 ASAP.
Version 2.12.1 caused CSS display issues in some instances when optimization plugins like WP Rocket and Autoptimize were also running on the site.
For Grow users that are also using the WP Recipe Maker plugin, Grow versions 2.12.1 and 2.12.2 have the potential to impact rich snippets because of the way that data is output through Yoast in the head of pages.
Our 2.12.3 release corrects this issue, and it is important to update to the most recent version to resolve this potential conflict on your site as soon as possible.”
How Does This Kind of Thing Happen?
Every software maker should ideally test their software before releasing it to the public.
This is something that happens once in awhile as sometimes not all errors can be caught. For example, a couple years ago there was a Yoast SEO bug released in a bad update. The Yoast bug caused users websites to generate thousands and thousands of extra web pages consisting of just an image.
Similarly, Grow by Mediavine tested their product but did not catch this one issue.
Grow Social Pro by MediaVine Changelog
A changelog informs the public of what has changed in a software and what that change is about. It’s a very standard thing in the software publishing community.
I searched MediaVine’s website for their changelog and could not find it. However it’s now made available here.
This is great. Obviously MediaVine is a responsible company and it’s a good reflection that they made that changelog available so that users can see what has changed and be able to make an informed decision about updating.
Screenshot of Grow Social Pro Changelog
A changelog details what has changed in a software update.
Updated: Public Statement by Mediavine
At the time of writing this article there was no public statement about this issue. There was only an email that was sent out.
Mediavine tweeted an explanation and an apology after this article went live:
An update to our WordPress plugin Grow Social Pro interfered in some cases with the output of Yoast SEO metadata.
We deeply regret this.
Learn what happened, how we fixed it & how we’re making sure it never happens again: https://t.co/z6mR7h6nuk@martinibuster @sejournal @yoast
— Mediavine (@mediavine) July 10, 2020
This has been a major problem for many people. They demonstrated their trustworthiness by swiftly updating their plugin and making a public statement.
Update Grow WordPress Plugin Immediately
If you have the Grow by Mediavine plugin installed, update to version 2.12.3 immediately.
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