Wordpress-seo: [Critical] Deprecated filter `category_link`

[Log1x]

• [x] I've read and understood the contribution guidelines.
• [x] I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

Please give us a description of what happened.

With the release of WordPress 5.4, the category_link filter located at class-rewrite.php#L18 has been deprecated causing warnings to be printed on live sites.

Deprecated: category_link is deprecated since version 2.5.0! Use term_link instead. 

You can see plenty of sites have already started indexing with the error present: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22category_link+is+deprecated%22

This needs fixed immediately.

Please describe what you expected to happen and why.

N/A

How can we reproduce this behavior?

N/A

Technical info

N/A

Used versions

• WordPress version: 5.4
• Yoast SEO version: Latest

[Log1x]

See #14462

Looks like it was forgotten about.

[Djennez]

@Log1x thanks for bringing this to our attention, I've verified the issue and passed it on to our product team.

[Djennez]

The fix has been merged and will ship with 14.0 in 2 weeks. Since the fix is merged and I can't trigger issue closing with the fixes at this point, I'm closing this for now.

If there's any new information or questions, please feel free to leave acomment.

[Log1x]

Would the issue at hand not warrant a hot-fix before 14.0 considering it is already affecting sites in the wild?

I can't imagine having:

Deprecated: category_link is deprecated since version 2.5.0! Use term_link instead. 

spammed throughout your site if you don't have error reporting disabled for 2 weeks being ideal for SEO– not to mention it being rather frustrating in a development environment with debugging enabled.

Please reconsider and push a fix ASAP.

[jdevalk]

Honestly if you run your site in development mode, this is the risk you run.

[jdevalk]

The issue that this happens on development environments too is real though. Discussing with the team.

[Djennez]

13.4.1 has been released with this patch. Thanks again for your report and warnings.

[ThomasTr]

Thanks for the hotfix

[Log1x]

Appreciate the fix. Can we get it pushed to Premium as well (namely Composer)?

[jdevalk]

We'll look at that tomorrow @Log1x. Assuming you're not running this on a live site, and if you are and you're using composer, that you're smart enough to repress errors on the live site :)

[jdevalk]

(oh and for your development environments I heartily recommend Query Monitor which moves all these warnings to a spot where they're not as annoying)