Removes SEO plugin (widget)

[sgiehl]

Description:

Matomo was providing a SEO widget, which allowed to fetch some stats around indexed pages on e.g. Google, Bing or Alexa. This widget failed to fetch its stats (on cloud) more and more, making the widget mostly useless.

Also when it comes to “SEO” in a dashboard, this widget under-delivers on what people would hope to see. We therefore decided to remove the widget.

If anyone would like to keep the widget please create an issue for that, and we might consider releasing it as a separate plugin instead.

refs #21712

Review

• Functional review done
• Potential edge cases thought about (behavior of the code with strange input, with strange internal state or possible interactions with other Matomo subsystems)
• Usability review done (is anything maybe unclear or think about anything that would cause people to reach out to support)
• Security review done
• Wording review done
• Code review done
• Tests were added if useful/possible
• Reviewed for breaking changes
• Developer changelog updated if needed
• Documentation added if needed
• Existing documentation updated if needed

[tsteur]

As this is a breaking change, can we add the changelog entry? Wondering actually if we should keep the plugin itself and keep the API returning an empty datatable and only remove the widget so we're not breaking the HTTP API? In Matomo 6 we could then break the API and remove the entire plugin.

[sgiehl]

@tsteur please discuss this with @mattab. The target was to remove this feature with lowest effort.
Personally I would have kept the feature and only disabled it on cloud (as it seems too much effort to test a possible fix there). Or alternatively move it to a plugin on marketplace, so at least on prem users still finding it valuable could still use it.

[tsteur]

@sgiehl I think the issue was maybe to remove the widget, not the plugin?

The target was to remove this feature with lowest effort.

I'd say it was about the lowest effort while still keeping our promises such as that we won't break our APIs. It could be even fine to only remove the Widget file itself and the rest in Matomo 6. This way it would have been very little effort to just remove the widget file without breaking the HTTP API etc.

Personally I would have kept the feature and only disabled it on cloud

It's overall fine to remove it as it provides very little value nowadays.

Breaking the API can be an issue. For example the Matomo Connect WordPress plugin uses the API in https://github.com/braekling/WP-Matomo/blob/master/classes/WP_Piwik/Widget/Seo.php#L14 etc.

[sgiehl]

In that case, we will move removing that plugin to Matomo 6. If it is causing problems on Cloud we can simply disable the plugin there. On premise it was working as expected anyway.

[github-actions]

If you don't want this PR to be closed automatically in 28 days then you need to assign the label 'Do not close'.

[github-actions]

This PR was last updated more than one month ago, maybe it's time to close it. Please check if there is anything we still can do or close this PR. ping @matomo-org/core-reviewers