Migrating Genesis Metadata to Yoast SEO

If you install Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin on top of your Genesis theme, you’ll notice that all your manually typed meta descriptions (and maybe keywords) just went completely missing. Meta description is an important element for search engine to index your pages and when you already have more than hundreds of pages and posts or even ten, then re-typing is definitely not an option.

Since I’m not aware of any way to do this from the plugin, the easiest way to do this is on the database.

Again as a forewarning, before you attempt to do this, backup everything in your MySQL to make sure you can revert back if you make a mistake. The solution is quick and simple, but it’s so easy to make a mistake that will corrupt your data and possibly more.

Go to your SQL admin interface such as phpMyAdmin (or you can do command line interface if you prefer) and run these sql commands:

UPDATE wp_postmeta
SET meta_key = '_yoast_wpseo_metadesc'
WHERE meta_key = '_genesis_description';

UPDATE wp_postmeta
SET meta_key = '_yoast_wpseo_metakeywords'
WHERE meta_key = '_genesis_keywords';

Here’s how it looks on phpMyAdmin panel:

You have to make sure that there aren’t any typos whatsoever on the value you need to assign on the meta_key or else you need to restore the database from the backup and start over.

These sql statements were tested on WordPress SEO version 1.4.24 and Genesis Framework 2.0.2. If you use older or newer versions of both software, you need to verify the meta_key if they’re still using the same values.