[SOLVED] The Text Link Counter Feature (Introduced In Yoast SEO 5.0) Is Currently Disabled

This guide takes you through the different alternatives and steps on how to solve / fix the “Text link counter feature (introduced in Yoast SEO 5.0) is currently disabled. For this feature to work Yoast SEO needs to create a table in your database. We were unable to create this table automatically”.

If you just updated Yoast SEO plugin to 5.0, you might have noticed the text link feature notification inside your WordPress. This is what exactly I saw when I updated all my other sites with a prompt to analyze all links. After the link analyzing was successful, a refresh showed me below error, and which prompted me share this post so that anyone else can learn how to go about solving it.

Alternative solutions for Text link feature currently disabled

Deactivate and Reactivate Yoast plugin – On one of my sites which has a few number of posts, deactivating and reactivating the Yoast SEO plugin solved the problem. Yes, the entire idea is very simple and easy. Log in to your WordPress, go to plugins, search Yoast and click deactivate. Reactivate and go back to Yoast dashboard. Chances are that the error will be solved.

Create Yoast tables – Yoast recommends that you contact your web host and ask them to create the tables for you. You can ask them to create {WordPress_table_prefix}yoast_seo_links and {WordPress_table_prefix}yoast_seo_meta. Depending on your table, replace the prefix “WP_” with what you have eg “XP_” if it is what you use. The prefix is defined in the wp-config.php file. Seee how the tables should look like below..

[sourcecode language=”plain”]CREATE TABLE `wp_yoast_seo_links` (
`id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`url` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`post_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
`target_post_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
`type` varchar(8) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `link_direction` (`post_id`,`type`)
) DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

CREATE TABLE `wp_yoast_seo_meta` (
`object_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL,
`internal_link_count` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0’,
`incoming_link_count` int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL,
UNIQUE KEY `object_id` (`object_id`)
) DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci;[/sourcecode]

Once you are done with creating the new tables manually, you can refresh the page and see the if the error is gone (of course it should unless there is another problem somewhere). That is all for now. I will update you just in case there is some other way for the same.