EDITS.WS

Tag: Software releases and updates

  • Yoast SEO 20.6: Introducing a new readability assessment

    Get ready for another release of Yoast SEO! Our team has been working hard to bring you new features, enhancements, and bug fixes that help improve Yoast SEO. In Yoast SEO 20.6, we’re introducing a readability assessment that helps you avoid using center-aligned text in your content. Plus, we have other upgrades that enhance your favorite SEO plugin. Update now!

    A new readability assessment: don’t center-align text

    To provide the best reading experience to users, we have added a new readability assessment. This warning reminds you not to use center-aligned text in your content, as this can make your content harder to read.

    Text aligned to the center can create readability, usability, and user experience problems. This is due to the uneven spacing between words, making it difficult for readers to stay engaged with the text flow. As a result, it is hard to identify the start and end of each line when the text is centered. Thus, making it challenging for people to keep track of their reading.

    Yoast SEO recommends avoiding center-aligned text in your content. This way, reading your content is much easier, and your page layout has the best user experience.

    Yoast SEO will give you a heads-up if you are using too much center-aligned text

    A heads-up: we’re deprecating the Zapier integration

    Yoast SEO users depending on the Zapier integration, should take note of the upcoming changes. Here’s a short timeline of what’s happening:

    • Starting May 2, 2023, the Yoast SEO integration with Zapier will be soft-deprecated. Existing Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will only work for users who haven’t updated to version 20.7 of Yoast SEO. If you have updated to version 20.7 or higher, your Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will stop working.
    • On May 9th, 2023, support for the integration with Zapier will end with Yoast SEO 20.7.

    To continue using Yoast SEO with Zapier, it’s recommended to check your Zaps and identify which ones will be affected by the end of support. By configuring your API calls using Webhooks by Zapier, you can continue to use Yoast SEO’s features in your Zaps. Please check out our help documentation for guidance if you have any questions.

    WooCommerce SEO 15.7: Product identifiers now for grouped products

    In WooCommerce, a grouped product is a type of product that allows you to group multiple simple products and sell them as a single item. To help you improve the metadata of your grouped products, we now support these in the SKU and product identifiers assessment in WooCommerce SEO 15.7.

    In the WooCommerce SEO analyses, we’ll check if your (grouped) products come with SKUs or product identifiers. Adding these makes it easier for search engines to understand your products as this information is passed via Product structured data for them to use.

    Yoast SEO 20.6 is out today!

    We hope you’re excited about the new version of Yoast SEO! With all the recent bug fixes, enhancements, and the new readability assessment, this release will help you take your website’s SEO and user experience to the next level.

    Thanks for using Yoast SEO, and happy optimizing!

    The post Yoast SEO 20.6: Introducing a new readability assessment appeared first on Yoast.

  • Yoast SEO 20.5: Improvements and security fixes

    We just released Yoast SEO 20.5, which has many enhancements and (security) fixes! Our team has been working hard to implement these changes to enhance your experience and help make your SEO journey smoother. In this post, we’ll tell you all about the latest release.

    Improvements in Yoast SEO 20.5

    One of the main enhancements in this release is the updated Google SERP preview. We’ve updated our mobile and desktop snippet previews to align with Google’s current styling. This is important because you can now check how enticing your snippets look. It also helps you to see if you’ve optimized them properly for the current Google search results pages.

    The updated preview mirrors Google’s current design again

    We’ve updated our database indexing system. This could contain orphaned items due to posts, terms, or users being deleted while Yoast SEO was deactivated. Every time a plugin is activated, we run a cleanup action. This helps to ensure the database table is as clean and efficient as possible.

    We’ve also improved the recognition of keyphrases starting with a period, such as “.net developer,” in the keyphrase in title assessment. This ensures that Yoast SEO can accurately read and assess your content, even when punctuation marks are involved.

    We’ve addressed several bugs in this release. One of those led to a fatal error when upgrading Yoast SEO while also having Local SEO active. We’ve also improved how we tidy up our database records when users are deleted. We’ve also dropped compatibility with outdated PHP versions, ensuring you use the most up-to-date and secure software for your website.

    Finally, we’ve made some modifications to the first-time configuration to highlight the availability of a free webinar to get the most out of Yoast SEO. This webinar is there to help new Yoast SEO users find their way around the plugin and get started on their SEO journey. They’ll have the chance to watch a dedicated walk through video and have a live Q&A session with some of our experts!

    Security fixes

    In Yoast SEO 20.5, we’ve also improved the security of our plugins. This update addresses several security vulnerabilities identified and reported by the WordPress security service Patchstack and our security/development team. We take security very seriously and are committed to ensuring our products are secure for all users.

    With this update, we have addressed and fixed these issues. We recommend that all users update their plugins to this latest version as soon as possible to stay protected from any potential security threats.

    Big thanks to Patchstack for promptly identifying and reporting this issue. We also thank our senior developers, Paolo Scala, Leonidas Milosis, and Enrico Battocchi, for finding and resolving these issues. Our users’ security is our top priority, and we will continue working tirelessly to ensure our product remains safe and secure.

    We strive to be comprehensive in our security measures, and we acknowledge that we sometimes might miss some issues. This is where we rely on you, our users and the security community to assist us by reporting any security concerns found to us directly. We have a security program with guidelines for submission and rewards for cooperation. We encourage everyone to help us uphold the integrity of our products and keep our community secure.

    Yoast SEO 20.5: Update now!

    Yoast SEO 20.5 is available today. In this release, we made several improvements and brought our Google to the latest UX changes from the SERPs. We’ve also fixed some security-related issues to make the plugin more secure.

    That’s it for this release. Happy updating!

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  • Yoast SEO reduces your site’s carbon footprint with crawl optimization

    Today, we’re very excited to be releasing Yoast SEO 20.4. With this release, we’re bringing our crawl optimization feature to Yoast SEO Free. With this feature, you can improve your SEO and reduce your carbon footprint with just a few clicks. This blog post will tell you about this feature and why we’ve brought it to Yoast SEO.

    Before we explain this Yoast SEO feature, it’s good to start with a quick reminder of what crawling is. Search engines like Google or Bing use crawlers, also known as bots, to find your website, read it and save its content to their index. They go around the internet 24/7 to ensure the content saved in its index is as up-to-date as possible. Depending on the number of changes you make on your website and how important search engines deem your site, the crawler comes around more or less often.

    That’s nice, but did you know crawlers do an incredible amount of unnecessary crawling?

    Let’s reduce unnecessary crawling

    As you can imagine, search engine crawlers don’t just visit your website but every single one they can find. The incredible number of websites out there keeps them quite busy. In fact, bots are responsible for around 30% of all web traffic. This uses lots of electricity, and a lot of that crawling isn’t necessary at all. This is where our crawl optimization feature comes in. With just a few simple changes, you can tell search engines like Google which pages or website elements they can skip — making it easier to visit the right pages on your website while reducing the energy wasted on unnecessary bot traffic.

    The carbon footprint of your website

    You might be wondering why we want to help you reduce the energy consumption of your website. Does it make that much of a difference? The answer is yes! Regardless of the size of your website, the fact is that your website has a carbon footprint. Internet usage and digital technology are two massive players in pollution and energy consumption.

    Every interaction on your website results in electricity being used. For instance, when someone visits your website, their browser needs to make an HTTP request to your server, and that server needs to return the necessary information. On the other side, the browser also needs the power to process data and present the page to the visitor. The energy needed to complete these requests might be small, but it adds up when you consider all the interactions on your website. Similar to when a visitor lands on your site, crawlers or bots also make these requests to your server that cost energy. Considering the amount of bot traffic (30% of web traffic), reducing the number of irrelevant pages and other resources crawled by search engines is worth it.

    Take control of what’s being crawled

    The crawl optimization feature in Yoast SEO lets you turn off crawling for certain types of URLs, scripts, and metadata that WordPress automatically adds. This makes it possible to improve your SEO and reduce your carbon footprint with just a few clicks.

    Check out this fun animation to get an idea of what this feature can do for your website:

    The crawl optimization feature was already part of Yoast SEO Premium, but today we’re also bringing it to the free version of our plugin. We do this to make as much of an impact as possible. There are over 13 million Yoast SEO users, so if everyone’s website crawling is optimized, we can have an enormous impact!

    How to use the crawl optimization feature

    How do you get started with crawl optimization for your website? Just go to Yoast SEO > Settings > Advanced > Crawl optimization. Here you will find an overview of all the types of metadata, content formats, etc., that you can tell search engines not to crawl. You can use the toggles on the right to enable crawl optimization.

    screenshot of crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO
    Screenshot of the Crawl optimization section in Yoast SEO settings

    The crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO 20.4 allow you to:

    • Remove unwanted metadata: WordPress adds a lot of links and content to your site’s and HTTP headers. For most websites, you can safely disable these, making your site faster and more efficient.
    • Disable unwanted content formats: For every post, page, and category on your site, WordPress creates multiple types of feeds; content formats designed to be consumed by crawlers and machines. But most of these are outdated, and many websites won’t need to support them. Disable the formats you’re not actively using to improve your site’s efficiency.
    • Remove unused resources: WordPress loads countless resources, some of which your site might not need. Removing these can speed up your site and save energy if you’re not using them.
    • Internal site search cleanup: Your internal site search can create many confusing URLs for search engines and can even be used by SEO spammers to attack your site. This feature identifies some common spam patterns and stops them in their tracks. Most sites will benefit from experimenting with these optimizations, even if your theme doesn’t have a search feature.
    • Advanced: URL cleanup: Users and search engines may often request your URLs using query parameters, like ?color=red. These can help track, filter, and power advanced functionality – but they come at a performance and SEO ‘cost.’ Sites that don’t rely on URL parameters might benefit from these options. Important note: These are expert features, so ensure you know what you’re doing before removing the parameters.

    Would you like to know more about using this feature and the separate toggles? Check out the help documentation on the Yoast SEO crawl optimization settings.

    Update to Yoast SEO 20.4 now

    That’s it for now. Make sure to update to Yoast SEO 20.4 and optimize your website’s crawling immediately! It’s not only better for your website, your site visitors, and search engines. It also has a positive impact on our environment. Especially when you realize how many we are, if all 13 million of us optimize the crawling on our website, we can reduce the amount of energy used by a ridiculous amount. So let’s start right now!

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  • Yoast SEO 20.3: Better highlighter and Portuguese language support

    Today, we’re making Yoast SEO 20.3 available to the world. This release comes with a long list of enhancements, bug fixes, and other improvements designed to help you improve your SEO experience.

    Improved highlighting in analyses

    One of the most significant updates in this release is an improved highlighting feature. Yoast SEO helps you quickly locate where you need to make your edits to improve the readability of your content by highlighting the pieces in your text.

    In this release, we’ve made the highlighter better. We can now highlight content in captions of audio, embed, gallery, image, table, and video blocks in WordPress. You can also use it to highlight content in Yoast SEO FAQ and How-to blocks.

    The highlighter helps you locate the places where you’ve used your keyword, like in this caption

    Portuguese language enhancements

    We’ve made important improvements to our Portuguese assessments in the release, like the passive voice and transition words assessments.

    Yoast SEO’s passive voice assessment helps you create clearer and more concise content. Passive voice can weaken sentences. It can make them harder to understand, so this assessment checks your text for instances of passive voice. By reducing the use of passive voice in your writing, you can improve your content’s overall quality and readability. The assessment is available in multiple languages.

    The transition words assessment in Yoast SEO helps improve the coherence and readability of your writing. Transition words are essential to connect ideas and help readers understand the flow of your content. By analyzing your text for the use of transition words, the assessment can suggest improvements to your writing. We’ll highlight instances where transition words could be added or replaced.

    In Yoast SEO 20.2, we’ve improved these two assessments for the Portuguese language. The passive voice assessment now has better detection of participles. Plus, we’ve added new transition words to the transition words assessment, thanks to the contributions of Mathias Ribeiro.

    Bug fixes and enhancements

    Regarding bug fixes, we’ve addressed several issues in this release. For example, shortcodes in the Block editor will no longer be treated as words in the content analysis. Additionally, editing text in the Classic editor while the highlighting feature is enabled will no longer make the text unfocused, and self-closing break tags </br> will now be removed when analyzing content.

    Other improvements in this release include avoiding PHP warnings due to a wrong variable type. Also, we removed the beta badge for the inclusive language assessment.

    Yoast SEO Premium redirect manager

    Yoast SEO Premium also gets a round of enhancements this time. For one, we’ve made the links in the redirect manager clickable. It’s now easier to check if these are functioning properly. The redirect manager in Yoast SEO Premium is a valuable tool for ensuring that your website visitors always find what they need. It helps prevent 404 errors and maintain a well-structured website, improving search engine rankings and user experience.

    Update to Yoast SEO 20.3

    At Yoast, we’re always working hard to improve our line of SEO plugins. Each release brings improvements and enhancements that make it easier to manage your site or improve its SEO. Yoast SEO 20.3 has a long list of fixes and improvements, from highlighting content to enhanced support for the Portuguese language.

    The post Yoast SEO 20.3: Better highlighter and Portuguese language support appeared first on Yoast.

  • Proactive security fixes in Yoast SEO (update to v20.2.1)

    We take security seriously at Yoast and continually look for potential threats and vulnerabilities that could affect our products and customers. That’s why we were alarmed when security firm WordFence found XSS vulnerabilities in another SEO plugin. After carefully reviewing the issues, we found a similar but less severe vulnerability in Yoast SEO, which we chose to patch immediately.

    Please update to the latest version today to ensure your site is protected.

    Am I affected?

    The issue only affected websites with multiple users, where those users had ‘contributor’ level access or above. In some cases, those users could store and execute code in our snippet editor, which would have run for other users. A malicious person could have taken advantage of this to compromise other users or the website in question. This is a type of ‘XSS’ attack.

    In short, some of the people you’d given limited permission to publish or edit content on your site might have been able to work around those permissions and do harm should they have wished to.

    What’s an XSS vulnerability?

    XSS stands for cross-site scripting, a type of attack that allows malicious actors to inject scripts into web pages viewed by other users. An issue like this can lead to various consequences, such as hijacking user sessions, defacing websites, or redirecting users to malicious sites.

    XSS vulnerabilities occur when user input fields are not properly sanitized (ensuring that values are safe and conform to expected formats and patterns) or not properly escaped (where special characters or code is safely converted to text).

    What do I need to do?

    If your site has multiple users, you may have been affected. If this applies to you, you should update your Yoast SEO plugin immediately. We also recommend conducting a security audit (see our security guide), enabling auto-updates for plugins, and ensuring that you have regular backups in place.

    If your site doesn’t have multiple users, you don’t need to worry. Of course, you should still update your plugin as part of best practices.

    What did Yoast do?

    We’re proud that we reacted quickly, fixed this issue, and released a patch within 24 hours. We also thoroughly reviewed parts of Yoast SEO and found no other security issues present. Thanks to this fix, Yoast SEO is now more secure than ever. Our development processes now include extra checks to ensure that issues like this don’t happen again.

    We can proudly say that our ability to react, diagnose, and deliver updates this quickly – whether they’re security fixes or responses to changes in Google’s algorithm — sets us apart from others.

    It takes a village

    While this issue should have never happened in the first place, we’re happy that we discovered it ourselves before it became common knowledge and a larger risk.

    That was made possible partly by the great work from WordFence in disclosing the related issue in another plugin and by Roger Montti’s article in Search Engine Journal covering the leak. We appreciate their professionalism and expertise in helping WordPress plugin developers improve their security.

    We also want to thank our customers for their trust and support. At Yoast, we’re committed to providing you with the best SEO plugins and will continue to improve them.

    If you have any questions or concerns about this issue or any other security matter, please do not hesitate to contact us at security@yoast.com. You can also participate in our security program to help us improve our work.

    Thanks for your understanding, and keep in mind that we are always here to help.

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  • Yoast SEO 20.2: Improving our database system

    In Yoast SEO 20.2, we’ve improved our innovative indexables technology. We’ve developed a faster and more reliable way of indexing your site’s data. In turn, we make better use of this data to improve your site’s SEO. Plus, this technology helps us do our best to make the web greener and lays the groundwork for exciting future possibilities.

    An improved indexing system

    You might be wondering, “What exactly are indexables?” Well, think of them as a way to help search engines find and understand the content on your website. An indexable is any resource a search engine can index via a URL.

    When a search engine “indexes” your website, it creates a map of all the pages it knows about. The indexables framework allows Yoast SEO to make a similar map of your site, interact with it and manage important SEO-related information.

    But what makes indexables so special? Essentially, they allow Yoast SEO to better handle different types of content on your website beyond just traditional pages. This includes things like categories, archives, media files and far beyond that. This can greatly help larger sites with many different content types. Plus, it helps us build features on top of it!

    And the best part? The indexables technology means better performance and more efficient use of resources. It’s a step towards making the web a little bit greener, as it reduces the amount of processing power needed to manage SEO metadata.

    So, how does this work?

    When you create a website, you like stuff to be easily accessible online. Indexables help Yoast SEO understand your website, so it can help search engines like Google understand your website better. Yoast SEO stores information about your website in a unique database table that we use to uncover and use your data — and speed up your database.

    To put indexables to work, you need to optimize your website’s SEO data. You can do this when you set up Yoast SEO or at a later date. When you optimize your SEO data, Yoast SEO will store information about your website’s pages in a unique table. This can take some time, especially for large websites, but you only need to do it once. After the initial optimization, Yoast SEO will automatically update the indexables table whenever you change something on your website.

    Today, we’re launching improvements to this system for Yoast SEO and WooCommerce SEO.

    You can run the indexables SEO optimization from the first-time configuration screen or in the tools section of Yoast SEO

    Going green with Yoast SEO

    Our enhanced database system is one of the many improvements we’ve made to make a difference on the web. Thanks to this technology, we’ve improved the loading times of millions of websites. Features like our crawl optimization options help you determine what search engines should and shouldn’t crawl — keeping them in check and making them waste fewer resources.

    When your website loads faster, it reduces the time and energy required to load and display each page. Less resources, such as electricity and data, are needed to load your website. This increased efficiency can positively impact the environment by reducing the energy required to power and cool the servers that host your website.

    Additionally, optimizing your SEO data and improving the crawlability of your website makes it more efficient and easier for search engines and visitors to navigate.

    Update to Yoast SEO 20.2

    Yoast SEO 20.2 comes with an update to our indexable database system. With this release, we’re laying the groundwork for some interesting new developments. Plus, we’ve improved the system’s performance, helping to achieve a better web — and a greener planet! — for all.

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  • Yoast SEO 20.1: Mastodon and inclusive language improvements

    After successfully introducing a new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0, we have more exciting news! We have built an integration with Mastodon, the decentralized and open-source social network. Yoast SEO Premium users can now verify the link in their Mastodon profile with this integration. We’re also adding your profile to the structured data we generate for your site. Plus, we’re improving our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO 20.1.

    Mastodon is picking up steam

    Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, many people have moved to the popular open-source alternative, Mastodon.

    Mastodon is part of the fediverse (a combination of the words federated and universe). Unlike Twitter, it’s a decentralized network of communities and platforms, powered by open-source communication software. This provides an alternative to centralized social media, giving users more control over their privacy and data. It also provides more options for people to join communities based on common interests and values.

    Introducing a Mastodon integration to Yoast SEO 20.1

    The Mastodon integration in Yoast SEO Premium does two things:

    1. It helps you verify the link to your site in your Mastodon profile
    2. It adds your Mastodon profile to the sameAs structured data we output for your site

    The integration allows users to verify the links on their Mastodon profile quickly and easily. Simply switch on the Mastodon integration, add the URL of your profile in Yoast SEO, and add a link to your site on Mastodon itself. After that, refresh your Mastodon page, which should show a green verified link in your profile.

    Enter the link to your Mastodon profile on the Site representation section of Yoast SEO

    The Schema structured data for Mastodon works automatically. After adding your Mastodon profile in the Yoast SEO settings, we add that link to the structured data graph we generate for your site. We use the same sameAs links for other platforms. This makes it easy for search engines to identify all the other platforms you are active on.

    This integration is part of our ongoing commitment to making content creation and distribution as seamless as possible for our users. Our values align with Mastodon’s focus on the open web, user privacy, free speech, and community building. So we’re excited to offer this integration to our users. Try it now!

    Also, an Easy Digital Downloads integration

    In addition to the Mastodon integration, we’ve added an integration for the popular Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) WordPress plugin. We improved Easy Digital Download’s Schema output for this integration and tied it into the Yoast SEO schema graph. This makes the combination much more robust. You can activate it in the Integrations section of Yoast SEO.

    More add-ons integrating with the Yoast SEO Schema API

    Improvements to the inclusive language analysis

    Over the past months, we’ve worked hard on making our inclusive language analysis as helpful as possible. In Yoast SEO 20.1, we are releasing an improved version of our inclusive language analysis. This latest addition to our collection of SEO tools emphasizes the importance of using language that is inclusive, respectful, and free of bias.

    Language is one of the most powerful tools for creating a more inclusive world. With the inclusive language analysis, we want to empower our users to make a positive impact through their writing.

    Creating content that resonates with all audiences is essential in today’s rapidly changing and diverse digital landscape. The inclusive language analysis provides real-time feedback on the language used in your content and offers suggestions to help you create more inclusive content.

    If you haven’t started using the new and improved inclusive language analysis, try it out now! Help create a more inclusive and respectful digital community for all.

    Upgrade now to Yoast SEO 20.1

    Two weeks ago, we successfully launched the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0. Reactions have been really positive! Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal said, “I’ve been practicing SEO for almost 25 years, and this version of Yoast is the easiest-to-use SEO plugin I’ve used to date.”

    After releasing that first piece of the puzzle, we are excited to present you with more shortly. But for now, we’re introducing Yoast SEO 20.1 with a new Mastodon integration and improvements to the inclusive language analyses.

    Happy updating!

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  • Yoast SEO 20.0: A brand-new settings interface

    We are thrilled to announce the release of Yoast SEO 20.0. This release features a brand-new, state-of-the-art settings interface that takes your SEO work to the next level. We took great care to design an interface that’s logical and easy while simultaneously fully featured. This user interface brings Yoast SEO ahead of the curve and prepares us for a bright future!

    Meet your new SEO best friend

    With Yoast SEO, we’ve always focused on building the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. We worked on the features first while forgetting the experience for a bit. So a new interface for Yoast SEO was a long time coming.

    It’s not hard to give an interface a new coat of paint, but thoroughly rebuilding it from the ground up is a lot of work. It means rethinking what goes where, what we want to be able to do in the future, and what this all should look like. Luckily, we pulled it off!

    A screenshot showing the site features part of the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0
    The new user interface we introduce in Yoast SEO 20.0

    A better interface for you and us

    We’ve worked hard to bring you this great new setting UI for Yoast SEO. For us, it’s the end of an era and the beginning of a beautiful future. This new interface makes it much easier for us to incorporate new features and improve Yoast SEO while giving you a modern experience that is a joy to use.

    Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, explains: “We felt that the default WordPress admin design no longer suited us. Our product team was itching to take our experience to the next level. WordPress’s interface was holding us back a bit, as the admin interface outside Gutenberg hasn’t progressed for years.”

    “I’m proud of what the team has built in the Yoast SEO 20.0 release,” says Thijs de Valk, CEO of Yoast. “Our team wanted to do this, and they delivered. It is a technically outstanding change and proves we are constantly improving and optimizing. Our new user interface shows we’ll keep delivering the best possible experience to our users. A very exciting first step in 2023!”

    A logical structure for settings in Yoast SEO 20.0

    The first thing you’ll notice about the new interface is its sleek, modern look and streamlined navigation. The new sidebar lets you quickly and easily access all essential settings and features without navigating multiple pages or menus. We’ve even added a search feature to find everything you need in a jiffy.

    In our help documentation, you can find a guide on navigating the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0 and what moved where. Or, check out the video above to get a walkthrough of the new settings.

    Four main sections

    We reshuffled the contents of the old settings and divided them into four main sections:

    • General:
      • Site features: here, you can easily switch specific features on and off, from the different analyses to IndexNow and the XML sitemaps.
      • Site basics: in this section, you can find the basic information about your site, like the name and tagline of the website, plus force rewrite options and the like.
      • Site representation: this section contains information about your site that helps search engines understand it better through Schema structured data, like if the site represents a person or an organization and which names, logos, and social media accounts are associated.
      • Site connections: here, you can connect the different search engine tools to your site, like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
    • Content types:
      • Here, you’ll find your site’s settings for each content type. You can determine how each should appear in search, what it should look like on social media, and what types of Schema structured data describe this content best.
    • Categories and tags:
      • Same as the content types, except this is for your taxonomies.
    • Advanced:
      • Here, you’ll find features like the Crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO Premium. Plus breadcrumbs options, plus settings for various archives and special pages.

    Individual feature settings pages

    One of the most significant changes in Yoast SEO 20.0 is the new, intuitive layout of all the individual settings pages. Each setting now has a clear and concise explanation, making it easy to understand what it does and how to use it. The new interface also includes insightful links to give you more context on optimizing your website for search engines. This makes it much more user-friendly for those who are new to SEO.

    This screenshot depicts the post settings where you can set how yoru posts should look in the search results
    Like a breath of fresh air

    Yoast SEO 20.0 is a game changer

    Overall, Yoast SEO 20.0 is a major step forward in developing the plugin, and we are confident that it will help you achieve your SEO goals more easily. The new interface is cleaner, more intuitive, and user-friendly. It’s now easier than ever for you to optimize your website for search engines. We are excited for you to start using the new interface and see it for yourself.

    Thank you for choosing Yoast SEO. We look forward to helping you improve your website’s rankings with our new, super-modern settings interface. And remember, this is only the beginning!

    Do tell us what you think in the comments below!

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  • New in Yoast SEO Free: the inclusive language analysis

    Earlier this year, we added a new feature to our Premium plugin, the inclusive language analysis. Now we’re excited to say that we’re bringing it to Yoast SEO Free as well. Why? Because we believe that using inclusive language is essential in making the web a better place.

    Taking a stance

    We believe that inclusive language is so important that we wanted to make sure that everyone (who wants to) can use this feature. Not only does it make you less likely to exclude people and alienate them with your content, but it’s also becoming more important in SEO every day. If you want to take advantage of this new feature, head to your features settings in Yoast SEO to turn it on. This will also be available in Yoast SEO for Shopify later this week.

    Does inclusive language matter for SEO?

    You might be wondering why we added a check for inclusive language in Yoast SEO, a product focused on improving your SEO. Using inclusive language helps you reach a wider audience and avoid alienating potential customers. It aims to create content that’s accessible and understandable to as many people as possible. This leads to more people returning to your website, sharing your content, and even buying what you’re selling.

    It simply helps you to write content that doesn’t exclude people. Content that doesn’t alienate or even offend a portion of your audience. Which, especially as a business owner (or website owner), you don’t want to do. And that can happen easily without you even realizing it. Google also points out the importance of using inclusive language in your content. You can learn more about this in our post about inclusive language and SEO.

    The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO

    This new feature works pretty similarly to our other analyses by giving you real-time feedback on your text with the use of traffic lights. Here is an example of what it looks like when in use:

    The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO

    It’s up to you whether you activate the analysis

    It’s good to know that the inclusive language analysis is opt-in, so it won’t be activated by default. It’s up to you whether you want to get feedback on the inclusiveness of your content. You can activate it by going to Yoast SEO > General > Features and toggling the inclusive language analysis switch. If you choose not to use this feature, the SEO and readability analyses won’t change.

    Screenshot of activating inclusive language feature
    Activate this feature ve language analysis in Yoast SEO > General > Features

    We strongly suggest using it as it can benefit your SEO and helps you make your content relatable for a bigger audience. The goal of inclusive language is to avoid excluding or alienating people. So, this new analysis helps you create content that everyone can enjoy and that’s less likely to offend anyone!

    Other improvements and fixes

    Of course, we’ve also worked on improvements for our SEO plugins. For instance, we’ve improved the subheading distribution assessment to make it easier to find those overlong paragraphs. Now, hit the eye icon to highlight the subheading where the piece of text appears. Very helpful when working on long articles! The same assessment also keeps an eye on your intro and warns you if you start your article with an overly long introduction.

    Quickly find overly long pieces of text

    We’ve improved our Integrations page, making it clearer which WordPress plugins hook into our Schema API. This means that the structured data output by these plugins will be neatly tied into the graph Yoast SEO generates for the site. Together, this forms a very comprehensive Schema solution. We urge other plugin developers to come on board — check out our Schema documentation!

    Improved admin bar menu

    Today, we’re cleaning up the admin bar menu and expanding the range of options. If you are a Yoast SEO Premium user, you can open up the front-end SEO inspector instantly to check the SEO settings of the page you are currently on. You’ll also find the focus keyphrase you set for this page and the overall readability and SEO scores in the famous colored dots. Plus, you can find quick links that let you send the page to be analyzed by external tools, like Google’s Rich Results Test or PageSpeed Insights. Of course, you also access the Yoast SEO settings from there.

    Updated admin bar menu in Yoast SEO 19.12

    Of course, there’s more. We’ve added a new Website name text field in the Site representation step of the First-time configuration. You can also set this in the Search Appearance section of the settings.

    We’ve also worked on improving compatibility with PHP 8.2. In addition, we now ask users to update to a recent version of PHP, as we are dropping support for PHP < 7.2 starting March 1st, 2023.

    Enjoy these Yoast SEO updates

    In this release, we’ve added support for our inclusive language analyses to our free Yoast SEO version. Try it out and see if you can write more inclusive content that will help you reach a broader audience.

    The post New in Yoast SEO Free: the inclusive language analysis appeared first on Yoast.

  • Yoast SEO 19.11: Upgrading your SEO data

    At Yoast HQ, we’re doing our part to make your websites run like clockwork. One of the things we’re working on is optimizing our Yoast SEO plugin to use fewer resources. This helps make your site faster and more efficient. In Yoast SEO 19.11, we’re doing this by streamlining your database.

    Improved SEO data optimization

    We ask you to let Yoast SEO index your website data so we can get to work immediately. The data we index ends up in a special table in your database, which stores all the information we might need from an SEO perspective. We use this to understand your site and make our behind-the-scenes processes run faster.

    In this release, we are improving the database and the underlying process determining how we fill the special table. In some cases, the table could contain things that shouldn’t end up in the database. This could cause the database to be more extensive than it should be, leading to slower server responses. We’ve now sped this up.

    In Yoast SEO 19.11, we put a lot of effort into ensuring that only things that need to end up in the database will end up in the database. We’re also cleaning up the database and deleting stray additions.

    To help you manage your database, we’ve added a WP-CLI command to clean up unused data from our custom database tables: wp yoast cleanup. Plus, we’ve added the wpseo_indexable_excluded_taxonomies filter to allow manually excluding taxonomies from being indexed.

    Update now to Yoast SEO 19.11!

    Yoast SEO 19.11 is ready for download. In this release, we’ve mainly worked on improving our database usage and finetuning how we handle the SEO data we index. Your database should now be leaner — making it faster and more efficient. Happy updating!

    The post Yoast SEO 19.11: Upgrading your SEO data appeared first on Yoast.