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Rankmath used to propose popular keywords in the SEO section while creating a new woocommerce product. It does not do that anymore: It doesn’t show the dropdown of popular keywords anymore when I start typing.
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If blocking on your side is not the cause of the problem,… what is?
Because it’s still a fact that the keyword suggestion random stops working.
There are 2 ways to get it TEMPORARY working again:
– change network and thereby also the ip address: for example when it stops working on my local wifi network I can get it to work by switching to my mobile hot spot. after a while if stops working there as well and again… and again … and again.
– when I wait a few hours it will start working again.But when it works it’s only for a few minutes and then it stops again.
The same problem happens on windows and mac, in chrome, edge and safari.
We are adding keywords to our products in the same way for multiple years now. Never had an issue until now. We did not change wordpress settings or whatever.
Still hoping to find a solution as RankMath now is useless for us.
If blocking on your side is not the cause of the problem,… what is?
Because it’s still a fact that the keyword suggestion random stops working.
There are 2 ways to get it TEMPORARY working again:
– change network and thereby also the ip address: for example when it stops working on my local wifi network I can get it to work by switching to my mobile hot spot. after a while if stops working there as well and again… and again … and again.
– when I wait a few hours it will start working again.But when it works it’s only for a few minutes and then it stops again.
The same problem happens on windows and mac, in chrome, edge and safari.
We are adding keywords to our products in the same way for multiple years now. Never had an issue until now. We did not change wordpress settings or whatever.
Still hoping to find a solution as RankMath now is useless for us.
to continue on my previous message:
I was testing with 1 specific product and started entering parts of a text to let it propose a few keywords. After less than 10 times the dropdown popped up, it stopped working and I started getting this error message in the console:
GET https://api.rankmath.com/ltkw/v1/?keyword=four%20roses&locale=nl net::ERR_FAILED 429 (Too Many Requests)
When you try to find the best keywords you very quickly reach about 10 proposals and that’s only for 1 specific product. While we used to be possible to add all products of a delivery at once without issues.
How does it decide that there are too many requests? Is it possible that my site is hidden behind my hosting’s firewall and the requests are combined with all clients of the hosting company?
some more details of the error:
Request: https://api.rankmath.com/ltkw/v1/?keyword=four%20roses&locale=nl
Request headers:
:authority: api.rankmath.com
:method: GET
:path: /ltkw/v1/?keyword=four%20roses&locale=nl
:scheme: https
accept: */*
accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd
accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,nl;q=0.8
origin: https://kadarine.be
priority: u=1, i
referer: https://kadarine.be/
sec-ch-ua: “Chromium”;v=”128″, “Not;A=Brand”;v=”24″, “Google Chrome”;v=”128″
sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0
sec-ch-ua-platform: “macOS”
sec-fetch-dest: empty
sec-fetch-mode: cors
sec-fetch-site: cross-site
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36Response headers:
cache-control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
cf-ray: 8bee12c71d6dba69-BRU
content-length: 5369
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
date: Fri, 06 Sep 2024 11:21:03 GMT
expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
referrer-policy: same-origin
retry-after: 1338
server: cloudflare
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains
vary: Accept-EncodingResponse status: 429
Hello,
The status code 429 happens when there are a lot of requests from the same IP address to the API and we rate-limit it. The number of calls you reported is in line with the limit we set for the cURL timeout which is currently set at 10.
This is done like this because we need to ping another external API to get the data and if we add more calls in such a short span of time it will be blocked on that external API.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
Sorry, but I don’t understand this reply.
I really really understand that to too many attempts are blocked, but blocking the functionality after 2 products while we are just following your own best practices of 5 keywords per product seems like a mistake, somehow…The purpose of RankMath when using it for woocommerce is to help it propose effective keywords and other SEO. Rankmath suggests to use 5 of keywords per webpage or product: https://rankmath.com/kb/keyword-research-with-rank-math/
After 10 keywords = max 2 products it blocks for more than 20 minutes. After the next 2 products it blocked me for 90 minutes and so on.
The pro version allow’s more than 5 keywords per product, but according to this even if I pay for pro you will block this functionality after 10 calls, so it becomes unavailable after 1 product in pro. So it’s even worse???
I’m talking here in name of my customer who has a rather small e-commerce site with twice a year about 500 new products. But according to your information you recently changed rankmath and now we need 250 days if want to enter all these products…
And please don’t tell me it has always been like that because this website uses rankmath for the same purpose for over 4 years now and it always worked without any issue.Doesn’t it make more sense there is a bug in this api call causing it to miscount the number of call’s?
For example I see in the trace that the expire date is in the past (year 1970???). So it looks like the number of api call’s is never refreshed, causing it to keep remembering the call’s and blocking me after every use:
Response headers: cache-control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 cf-ray: 8bee12c71d6dba69-BRU content-length: 5369 content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 date: Fri, 06 Sep 2024 11:21:03 GMT expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT referrer-policy: same-origin retry-after: 1338 server: cloudflare strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains vary: Accept-Encoding Response status: 429Hello,
The rate-limit only happens when the calls are made consecutively and in a short span of time. That can also be caused by having a shared IP range when using shared hosting.
Our reply was just to let you know that we do have a rate-limiting option for that API.
The date you are referring to in the API call is the
expiresheader to make sure it’s never cached so it always gets the most recent data from the calls. It has nothing to do with refreshing the API calls.We did implement rate-limiting into all our API calls to protect our servers from unwanted attacks but at the moment we are not looking into changing these rate-limiting options because that would cause issues with the other external API we use for this.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
All of that might be true but still you did help me solve the issue.
What do I need to do to make it work again?We don’t use it more than we did in the previous years and it doesn’t make sense that 2 products per day is the maximum. not for this website, but also not for any other e-commerce site. That’s not a lot of calls made consecutively and in a short span of time!
I mean, this is a small e-commerce site with a limited number of products, it’s not amazon…
It always worked in the last 4 years, so why did it stop now? and how to fix it?
Hello,
The only way to fix this is by circumventing the throttling being applied to the website by rotating the IP addresses via a VPN or any other similar method that you might have available on your network.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
Now I’m starting to think you just want to ignore the problem.
There aren’t too many requests!!
Unless you now confirm that using rankmath for 2 products a day (1 product a day in case of the paid version) is the maximum usage you allow.Hello,
The bottom line is that the 429 status code only happens when there are a lot of consecutive requests to the same API call in a short period of time. You are seeing that error on the website, so the IP range that is trying to ping the API is getting throttled because of the excessive calls.
Those are the facts and we will not change the rate-limiting options on our API calls because of the potential security issues that would bring to our company.
There are no limits on the number of products you can optimize, the limit is on the number of calls to the API that you can do. For example, if we test our local installations we can get all the suggestions we want because the IP ranges are not being rate-limited, and the same is true for plenty of other users who don’t have their IPs rate-limited.
Since your IP is getting throttled the only way around it is to switch to a different one to bypass this.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.
is it 1 specific IP address that gets blocked or a full range?
the ip address of the client pc brwosing the site? or the ip address of the webserver?Hello,
The IP addresses that get blocked are the ones from the person currently accessing the website to trigger the API call. It blocks a full range.
Thank you.
I did a test to confirm this by calling this url from the browser on multiple machines, networks, with and without proxy/vpn:
https://api.rankmath.com/ltkw/v1/?keyword=test&locale=nlI also asked other clients to do the same test on their machines and networks.
Conclusion:
Every machine can call it 20 times. than the public ip address of your home/company gets blocked, blocking ALL machines in your network.Doing in from within wordpress it’s even less than 20 because it does a call every time you pause typing. That probably explains the +/- 10.
As you confirm this is not a bug, but on purpose and not open for change, it means something has been changed. Because this was not the case in the last 4 years where we could enter all products of a delivery without being blocked, causing it to propose more than 500 keywords a day, distributed over +/- 8 hours.
Still hoping this is some kind of mistake. If not you hereby seem to confirm that this functionality now is nothing more than a nice gadget that actually cannot be used in a production environment of any e-commerce website. Because every serious e-commerce site will on a regular base need to enter more than 20 keywords:
20 keywords is max 4 new products if you add 5 keywords per product, don’t pause while typing and don’t make any typo. Otherwise it will even be less.Looks like I will have to explain to more than 20 clients why they will have to migrate to a new SEO tool :-S
Hello,
As we mentioned before this is not an issue, it’s the way we intend it to work. If you don’t make consecutive calls to the API in a short span of time, the calls work just fine, that is the intended behavior.
Thank you.
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