46. Migration from Yoast | SEO Forge - Rank Higher with AI-Powered SEO

SEO Forge includes a built-in migration tool accessible at SEO Forge > Migration in the admin menu. It reads Yoast data directly from the database without requiring Yoast to be active.

What Gets Migrated

Yoast Meta Key	SEO Forge Meta Key
`_yoast_wpseo_title`	`_seoforge_meta_title`
`_yoast_wpseo_metadesc`	`_seoforge_meta_description`
`_yoast_wpseo_focuskw`	`_seoforge_focus_keyword`
`_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex`	`_seoforge_noindex`
`_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow`	`_seoforge_nofollow`
`_yoast_wpseo_canonical`	`_seoforge_canonical_url`
`_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-title`	`_seoforge_og_title`
`_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-description`	`_seoforge_og_description`
`_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-image`	`_seoforge_og_image`
`_yoast_wpseo_twitter-title`	`_seoforge_twitter_title`
`_yoast_wpseo_twitter-description`	`_seoforge_twitter_description`

Custom Yoast canonical URLs (_yoast_wpseo_canonical) are imported into _seoforge_canonical_url. Empty or invalid values are ignored; valid values are emitted as the post’s only .

Programmatic Migration

// Trigger migration programmatically (same as the admin UI)
if ( class_exists( 'SEOFORGE_Migration' ) ) {
    $migration = SEOFORGE_Migration::instance();
    // The migration is triggered via AJAX in the admin UI
    // For programmatic use, call the internal methods
}

Manual Migration via SQL

// Migrate Yoast titles to SEO Forge (if Migration tool is unavailable)
global $wpdb;

$yoast_meta = $wpdb->get_results(
    "SELECT post_id, meta_value FROM {$wpdb->postmeta}
     WHERE meta_key = '_yoast_wpseo_title' AND meta_value != ''"
);

foreach ( $yoast_meta as $row ) {
    $existing = get_post_meta( $row->post_id, '_seoforge_meta_title', true );
    if ( empty( $existing ) ) {
        // Resolve Yoast variables: %%title%%, %%sitename%%, %%sep%%
        $title = str_replace(
            [ '%%title%%', '%%sitename%%', '%%sep%%' ],
            [ get_the_title( $row->post_id ), get_bloginfo( 'name' ), '|' ],
            $row->meta_value
        );
        update_post_meta( $row->post_id, '_seoforge_meta_title', sanitize_text_field( $title ) );
    }
}

Post-Migration Verification

// After migration, re-analyze all posts to update scores
$post_ids = get_posts( [
    'post_type' => [ 'post', 'page' ], 'post_status' => 'publish',
    'posts_per_page' => -1, 'fields' => 'ids',
] );

$analyzer = SEOFORGE_Analyzer::instance();
foreach ( $post_ids as $pid ) {
    $analyzer->analyze( $pid );
}

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