I’m getting this same issue quite frequently too
Hello @revschaef!
We checked the URL you provided and we can see the meta description as “The blog of Rev. Mark Schaefer containing articles, sermons, essays, book excerpts, and reflections on faith, theology, and language.”. What focus keyword/keyphrase are you using?
As for the focus keyphrase not in first paragraph warning, this is often thrown out if there’s an HTML element, code, image, or whitespace around the keyword which is affecting Yoast’s ability to scan for it. Can you please switch to classical or code view and inspect the post and check if there’s anything above the first paragraph?
Hi @onlyincebu,
My keyphrase is “The blog of Rev. Mark Schaefer.”
As far as the first paragraph, it is marked by a <p class=”no-emphasis”> tag to avoid the theme giving the paragraph a drop cap. When I remove the tag, doing so doesn’t seem to change the SEO warning.
We recently fixed a bug causing unrecognizable focus keyphrase if it contains a punctuation mark such as a period. Can you please make sure your plugin is updated? The latest version is 14.8.1. Please also make sure that your WordPress, theme and all other plugins are up-to-date.
As for your other concern, can you please save the post, clear all your cache (plugin, server, browser, CDN), and open the post again and see if the warning is still there?
The plugin, theme, and WordPress are all up-to-date, and I cleared the cache. That didn’t work. But changing “Rev.” to “Reverend” fixed it and eliminated those two problems and warnings.
Hi @revschaef,
Thank you for your reply.
We understand that when you changed Rev. to Reverend that it’s seen as one sentence and then the improvement/warnings go away. When a key phrase includes one or multiple periods, the detection might not off and false positives might occur. We are continuing to improve these edge-cases.
Thank you, @jeroenrotty. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the eventual update 🙂
