Thank you for your advice Jaideep but wow
You obviously are very experienced with databases if your interpretation of what I said would imply I would understand the results that plugin pulled up.
If I knew anything about database tables etc I wouldn’t have needed your help.
As much as I would love to clean my whole database if its this complicated I would rather leave it than risk breaking my website. All I wanted was to remove the duplicates in my database, can you help with that, so that Rankmath can work correctly ?
Kind regards
Andrew
Hello,
If you don’t want to use the plugin then you will have to do a manual check of your database to detect duplicate entries and remove them. You can also hire a freelancer to do that for you.
If the issue with the focus keyword appears again then you can check your postmeta table for the meta key rank_math_focus_keyword to check if there is a duplicate entry for the same focus keyword.
Hope this helps. Let us know if you need any further assistance.
I wrote a response to this Jaideep but maybe I didn’t send it as I cant see it above.
I really appreciate your help but that doesn’t help. I thought it would be clear from above I don’t know anything about databases otherwise I wouldnt be coming to you for help. That plugin brings up loads of databases,and other stuff. I cleaned some stuff yesterday but didnt know what I cleaned. Luckily I stopped because I found my automated backup for the day didnt work, I only hope I didnt break anything on my site. I would love to clean my whole database. from what you said it could be really benefiticial but not at the risk of breaking my whole website, at the end of the day I just need to fix whatever is causing Rankmath to recognise keywords as being duplicated. Can you help with that ?
However, if you know that the stuff the plugin brings up can be deleted without risk, that’s great I will go ahead and clean everything it brings up but does that include whatever would be causing the duplicates ?
Thanks and kind regards
Andrew
Hello,
Please kindly share your cPanel details so that we can look into the database directly. Also, Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.
Please also share the affected focus keyword.
Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.
Hi Ankit
You will see in the history of this chat unfortunately the issue isnt related to one keyword. I think this is happening for all keywords. Bascially I exported content from my old theme and imported it in to my new theme including metadata from Rankmath but it doesnt show everything correctly so I have to go through it all and correct everything including re-adding the keywords and when I do that Rankmath recognises the keyword as being used before. I think your colleague felt that’s because all the keywords are in my database but I have no experience with databases so wouldn’t know how to fix that. So I need to know whether I should just ignore the warnings from Rankmath or if you can give me some more help ?
Thanks
Andrew
Hello,
Since the issue is happening for all the keywords that you are adding again to your imported post, it seems the meta data import you tried failed to update in the frontend due to the mismatch of the post ids but it created entries in the database and that’s why you are seeing that error.
To fix that you will need to check your database for the post ids that don’t exist on your site but are in your database inside the postmeta table, and delete them. If you don’t have any experience with managing the database then you can hire a freelancer to help you with this.
However, you can also disable that test by using the following filter in your theme’s functions.php file: https://rankmath.com/kb/disable-seo-content-tests/#num-13-disable-the-keyword-not-used-test
Once disabled, you will not see a warning for the duplicate focus keyword.
Hope this helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.
Thanks.
It doesnt really give me the help I was hoping for as I don’t have the money for a developer right now hence why I am only using the free version of Rankmath. Anyway, I understand this may be outside of the scope of your support, so I will try to find a way around this.
Kind regards
Andrew
Would you mind just explaining step-by-step how I get to the data and how to delete it ?
Hello,
We did a quick SQL query to look for orphaned entries in your post meta table that is used to save all this information and the query came up empty which means there are no orphan entries in there anymore.
Orphan entries are rows in the database table referencing a post that no longer exists.
Then we checked a couple of listings on your website but couldn’t find any with the error about the duplicate focus keyword, so if you still some please indicate those to us and we’ll have a closer look.
Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Thank you for looking. Hopefully the issue is resolved however, that error only seems to appear after I add a keyword, so I will let you know if that happens. I did optimise some stuff using that plugin, so I don’t know if that could have fixed it. I have had some critical errors since and typically my hosts automated backup service didn’t work the day before. However, I am hoping the critical error isn’t related to that and am reaching out to the themes author as the error notification refers to the theme. Anyway, thanks again and I’ll let you know if the duplicate error happens again. Kind regards, Andrew
Hello,
If the issue with the keywords starts again do let us know and we can take a closer look at the situation.
We hope you get the other fatal errors solved by your theme provider.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if any other question arises about Rank Math or SEO in general.
Thank you.
Hello,
You’re welcome.
Let us know how this goes.
Meanwhile, please don’t hesitate to contact us anytime if you have other questions to assist you further with anything else.
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
