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

• 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 get_head 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

[lucymtc]

Opened PR #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 get_head 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.