Yoast SEO Eliminate Notifications

I am a huge fan of the WordPress plugin Yoast SEO, however I’m not a big fan of the notifications it includes.

Leveraging the power of WordPress filters, we can suppress these messages. The following information is based on Yoast SEO 3.2.3 and may not be accurate for other versions.

The Notifications to Eliminate

There are two specific notifications, I’d like to eliminate:

The Start Tour popup on the menu
The Find Out What’s New alert

Eliminating “Start Tour”

Before displaying the Start Tour popup, Yoast SEO checks for the user_meta value wpseo_ignore_tour and if it has a value of 1, the popup is not displayed (i.e. it is ignored). We can filter this user_meta value and override it with our own value.

add_filter( 'get_user_metadata', 'fe_yseo_tour', 10, 3 );

function fe_yseo_tour( $val, $id, $meta_key ) {
    if ( 'wpseo_ignore_tour' === $meta_key ) {
        return '1';
    }
    return $value;
}

Eliminating “Find Out What’s New”

Before displaying the Find Out What’s New alert, Yoast SEO compares the current Yoast SEO version to the highest version the user has previously viewed. The highest version where the user has viewed the about page is stored in user_meta wpseo_seen_about_version. Again, we can filter this value and override it with our own.

add_filter( 'get_user_metadata', 'fe_yseo_what_new', 10, 3 );

function fe_yseo_what_new( $val, $id, $meta_key ) {
    if ( 'wpseo_seen_about_version' === $meta_key ) {
        return '9999.0.0';
    }
    return $value;
}