Almost anyone that uses Yoast SEO by team Yoast will agree that it is a great SEO plugin, but the developers are adding more and more unwanted things to the WordPress Dashboard.
The purpose of the SO Hide SEO Bloat plugin is to clean up all those unwanted things.
Since v2.0.0 (released on February 4, 2016) we have a Settings page!
The purpose of the settings page is that you can fine-tune what is hidden or removed to your liking. By default most of the bloat that the Yoast SEO plugin generates is hidden or removed, just like before when there were no settings yet.
It is a good idea to have a look at the Settings page if only to see what you can fine-tune. The link to the page has been added to the Yoast SEO menu and of course there is also a link to it from the Plugins page.
The default settings of the current release are as follows:
- hide the cartoon-style sidebar ads on almost all settings pages of the Yoast SEO plugin
- hide about nag that shows on every update of the plugin
- hide recalculate nag that alerts user that SEO score algorithm has been updated
- hide tagline nag that shows when your site uses the default WordPress tagline
- hide robots nag that shows when your site is blocking access to robots, for example on dev and staging sites; it also hides the warning in the advanced tab of Yoast SEO UI in edit Post/Page screen
- hide Google Search Console nag that warns about not missing any crawl errors by connecting the Yoast SEO plugin to it
- hide image warning nag that shows in edit Post/Page screen when featured image is smaller than 200×200 pixels
- hide add keyword button that shows in edit Post/Page and only serves to show an ad for the premium version
- hide seoscore traffic light in publish/update box on edit Post/Page
- hide the SEO Score, Title and Meta description admin columns on the Posts/Pages screen; Focus keyword column can be hidden too
- remove SEO Settings sub menu of SEO menu in admin bar; additional option is to remove the Keyword Research sub menu
- remove the Yoast SEO widget from the WordPress Dashboard
- the tour is set to seen (there is no setting for this as the tour can be seen at any moment by going to the General settings of the Yoast SEO plugin)