Unable to fetch head metadata on search strategy when search keys has more than one word

[nicholasio]

Describe the bug

There seem to be a few issues with the Yoast get_head endpoint that is not properly recognizing the requested page as a search page.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Go To Search
2. Search for two words
3. Missing/wrong metatags or crash.

Screenshots, screen recording, code snippet

No response

Environment information

No response

WordPress information

No response

Code of Conduct

• [X] I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[lucymtc]

@nicholasio I have also noticed an issue with get_head endpoint when appending the url param with '${getWPUrl()}/?s=${params.search} If the WP url returned by getWPUrl() has a trailing slash, this will add double slash to //?s= where get_head endpoint returns page not found. I needed to do const wpUrl = getWPUrl().replace(/\/$/, ''); first to remove the trailing slash

[nicholasio]

Thanks @lucymtc Here are a few things I found:

• Yoast is not properly detecting a search page via the get_head function.
• Searching for multiple words crashes the get_head query and thus makes the framework default to the metadata of the first post returned.
• Yoast also does not yoast_head to the WordPress search endpoint.

I'm not sure if we can rely on on Yoast to generate the meta tags for the search page.

[nicholasio]

Alternative solution: Have the SearchStrategy manually build the yoast_seo object and yoast_html fields manually with basica meta tags.

[lucymtc]

@nicholasio for the issue:

• Searching for multiple words crashes the get_head query and thus makes the framework default to the metadata of the first post returned.

I found what the problem is and opened an Issue and PR in Yoast

I tried to override the validate callback for the URL, the way to do this would be to register a get_head endpoint from our side as if $override is set to false in register_rest_route WP merges with newer overriding if duplicate keys exist. The problem is that you need to pass in the exact arguments that the original register_rest_route (the one in Yoast) is called with, and the callback function depends on an instance of\Yoast\WP\SEO\Routes\Indexables_Head_Route which has dependencies in other Yoast classes and doesn't make it straight forward to instantiate the class. Unless Yoast exposes an instance of the class but I haven't found anything so far. I tested other hooks to try override the validation callback without success.

[lucymtc]

Update on fix for _"Searching for multiple words crashes the gethead query and thus makes the framework default to the metadata of the first post returned." has been merged into Yoast via this PR https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/pull/21032

[lucymtc]

Opened PR https://github.com/10up/headstartwp/pull/663 for: Yoast is not properly detecting a search page via the get_head function. Yoast does not yoast_head to the WordPress search endpoint.

[nicholasio]

Update on fix for _"Searching for multiple words crashes the gethead query and thus makes the framework default to the metadata of the first post returned." has been merged into Yoast via this PR Yoast/wordpress-seo#21032

Looks like the PR merged will be released in Yoast 22.0.