Jetpack and WordPress SEO

Jetpack and WordPress SEO:
The Jetpack plugin for WordPress has quite a few nice bits and pieces. There’s one issue: the developers at Automattic seem to think they’re alone in the world. In their last release, they enabled OpenGraph tags by default with no setting to disable it. Even when you already have WordPress SEO enabled and OpenGraph enabled in that. This is making people freak  out everywhere as double OpenGraph tags lead to problems with Google+ and with Facebook.

Disable OpenGraph in Jetpack

The best solution, honestly, is to install another plugin by Mark Jaquith, called Manual Control for Jetpack. This disables Jetpack automatic activation of new modules. Now you at least have to manually do something for stuff to break on your site when the Jetpack team decides to push new stuff.
This particular OpenGraph feature is in the Publicize module, so you’d think you could disable that, but that doesn’t seem to work. Instead, adding this line in your functions.php should fix this particular problem:

add_filter( 'jetpack_enable_opengraph', '__return_false', 99 );

I understand that disabling OpenGraph in WordPress SEO could work too. I would recommend against that though, especially if you use our Video SEO plugin as that relies on our ability to control OpenGraph tags.

Calling for Automattic to be more responsible

I also want to call on Automattic‘s Jetpack team. You guys should know better than to do stuff like this. You’ve literally cost me about half a days worth of support work now with this single release. It’d be cool if you, just like the rest of Automattic, would work with the community instead of against it.
I know you’re capable of it, because this line in the plugin:

if ( in_array( 'facebook/facebook.php', $active_plugins ) )
add_filter( 'jetpack_enable_opengraph', '__return_false', 99 );

This shows me that you did think about what would happen if Facebook’s plugin was active. That’s logical because people at Automattic worked on that plugin too. Now next time, please look at some of the repositories most popular plugins too and adjust accordingly. At the very least start a conversation with plugin authors about what’s coming up when you create stuff that clashes.
Update: might be good to note, when Facebook’s plugin is active and OpenGraph is enabled in my SEO plugin, my plugin filters the output of the Facebook plugin to prevent two sets of OpenGraph tags. Niall Kennedy of Facebook has actually also submitted a patch to my SEO plugin to improve how it does OpenGraph. That’s how this community should work.
Jetpack and WordPress SEO is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!


DIGITAL JUICE