We are happy to announce the release of the latest version of Yoast SEO. This update focuses on enhancing performance, fixing bugs, and improving our features. Don’t forget to check out our recently launched generative AI feature! Here’s Yoast SEO 21.3.
Performance enhancements
By design, Yoast SEO stores image metadata for every post upon saving, which we use in several features, like schema output. This meant that for larger websites with loads of images, publishing or editing a post could take longer than expected, especially if a post contained a lot of those images.
With Yoast SEO 21.3, we released an improvement for this by taking advantage of each editor’s inherent handling of images. This enabled us to stop calls to the database that created these delays in the first place. For the combination of editors and blocks that worked, we noticed considerable decreases in the duration times of post-saving in our benchmark tests. Of course, the improvements heavily rely on the editor used for post creation and the image blocks added to the post content.
Word complexity improvements in Premium
Improving readability is a vital part of creating high-quality content. It’s one of the reasons we give you the tools needed to help you write that awesome content. Our in-house linguists always work hard to make these tools as good and helpful as possible. In Yoast SEO 21.3, our team updated the word complexity feature available in Yoast SEO Premium.
The word complexity assessment marks complex words so that you can replace these with simpler alternatives. This will make your text easier to understand.
In Yoast SEO 21.3, we’ve improved the accuracy of this assessment in English by recognizing more plural forms of non-complex words. For example, the plural form universities is no longer marked as a complex word, just like the singular form university.
Generative AI in Yoast SEO Premium
As a reminder, in Yoast SEO 21.0, we added an innovative AI-powered feature that makes you quickly generate titles and meta descriptions. With this cutting-edge technology, you can optimize your content and metadata more effectively, saving you valuable time and resources.
Update now to Yoast SEO 21.3
Upgrade to the latest version of Yoast SEO now and benefit from better performance, advanced features, and easier SEO optimization. If you go Premium, you can use our AI-enhanced technology to achieve great results quickly. Download today’s update and enhance your visibility in the search engines.
Today, there’s a constant demand for more efficient and effective SEO practices. Keeping this in mind, we’re constantly updating and refining the features of Yoast SEO. One of our key milestones was the release of Yoast SEO 21.0, where we revealed a pioneering generative AI to redefine SEO optimization. In our next release, Yoast SEO 21.1, we’re improving upon that work.
AI in Yoast SEO
In Yoast SEO 21.0, we introduced a generative AI tool that simplified the generation of SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions. No longer a tedious manual effort, this tool gives you the power to create engaging titles and descriptions at the click of a button. This innovative application of generative AI eliminates the complexity of SEO optimization, freeing up valuable time to produce top-quality content.
Here’s the awesome video we made to remind you!
Building upon this foundation, we’re excited to present Yoast SEO 21.1, continuing our journey into optimizing your SEO with AI. We’re making the first behind-the-scenes improvements to improve the performance and results of the generative AI feature. This makes your content more appealing, while also upholding its SEO-friendly character. Remember that the AI generator functionality only works when the SEO analysis is turned on. If you don’t have it activated, we’ll show a message alerting you about this.
Let generative AI in Yoast SEO help you make great titles and meta descriptions
Making the most of Yoast SEO Premium
If you’re still on the fence about including AI in your SEO strategy, we recommend trying out Yoast SEO Premium. This grants access to our robust AI feature and equips you with other advanced tools to enhance your site’s SEO performance. More so, these tools are specifically designed to streamline your workflow and amplify your productivity.
Fixes and enhancements
As usual with our new releases, Yoast SEO 21.1 brings a series of fixes and enhancements to boost performance. We’re always at work to keep Yoast SEO a practical and reliable tool that supports your needs.
We value your trust in Yoast SEO, and our goal is always to deliver tools that simplify your SEO routine. So, we would like to encourage you to upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium to unlock the full potential of your site’s SEO capabilities with AI and our advanced features.
Update to Yoast SEO 21.1
Yoast SEO 21.0 was a great success, and we can’t wait to show you what’s next. As we continue to improve your SEO experience, we invite your feedback to help us refine our services further. Comment on this post, use the WordPress forums, or contact us via our socials — it’s all good. Guided by your input, we can ensure Yoast SEO remains high-quality, effective, and user-friendly. Be smarter with SEO in Yoast SEO 21.1!
Say goodbye to the manual labor of creating SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions! We’re excited to introduce an AI-powered breakthrough in Yoast SEO 21.0 that transforms how you optimize your content. We’ve harnessed the power of generative AI to bring you effortless title and meta description generation at the click of a button. Dive into our newest release and experience the benefits of seamless SEO optimization, giving you more time to craft quality content and less time worrying about SEO details.
Simplified SEO
We’ve designed this update of Yoast SEO to eliminate the hassle of your SEO optimization efforts. We all know that creating SEO-friendly titles and descriptions can be complex, often consuming a lot of your time and requiring an understanding of SEO best practices. Not anymore. Unlock the potential of AI with the newest release of Yoast SEO Premium. You can now generate titles and meta descriptions with just a click!
Now available as beta in Yoast SEO Premium
The new AI feature is now available as a beta in Yoast SEO Premium. As we fine-tune the API, you might see system messages in this beta phase. These are not huge issues, and it’s certainly not your fault. Simply try again if you see a message pop up! Think of it as getting a sneak peek behind the scenes, like witnessing a chef in a restaurant kitchen perfecting your dish. It’s all part of the process as we refine and optimize the product. You can activate the AI feature in the Yoast SEO settings.
We’re constantly working to improve our AI features, which is where we need your input. We value your feedback and ideas to ensure our products serve you better each time. We understand how quickly the world moves, particularly in areas like LLMs and generative AI. So, we are ready to make numerous tweaks and changes to keep pace and maintain high quality. Together, let’s explore this exciting new chapter!
Powered by generative AI
The new feature in Yoast SEO 21.0 uses advanced generative AI to create engaging, creative, SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions. Relying on large language models, machine learning algorithms and fed with vast amounts of data, our AI understands your content to provide you with optimal suggestions.
Generating SEO titles and meta descriptions is now easy as pie with Yoast SEO Premium
Why use AI for SEO
SEO involves techniques and strategies to rank your site higher in search results. One of them is to have good, catchy titles and relevant meta descriptions that appeal both to readers and search engines.
But the challenges are real. Manually crafting these pieces of content can be tedious, and time-consuming and may require an advanced understanding of SEO. This is where our new feature steps in.
Here’s how the AI in Yoast SEO Premium benefits you
Saves time: You can focus more on creating quality content when you automate the generation of titles and meta descriptions.
Enhances creativity: It helps stimulate creative and engaging titles and descriptions, ensuring they grab the reader’s attention in search results.
Improved CTR: Leveraging AI for your SEO efforts can revolutionize your content optimization strategy and helps the number of people clicking through to your site.
Integrated workflow: By integrating different tasks — in this case, content creation and SEO optimization — into a seamless workflow, you save time, reduce complexity, and increase productivity. It also ensures that all your work is aligned toward one goal, increasing the effectiveness of your efforts.
Let us walk you through the functionality to show how this new feature will help you do SEO.
How does it work?
The AI feature in Yoast SEO 21.0 works for all your content. Here’s how:
Get started: Activate the AI feature in the Yoast SEO settings. Locate the ‘Use AI’ button. You’ll find this in the Google Preview in the Yoast SEO Premium sidebar or by scrolling down your post. Once your content is ready, click this button, and our AI feature will appear.
One-time consent: We’ve powered the AI features in Yoast SEO with external services. We need your consent to allow you to use them. Remember that we’ll transfer your data once you consent to use the AI feature.
AI at work: Ask it to generate titles or meta descriptions. Our advanced algorithms analyze your content after you click the button. The AI then uses this to generate a list of engaging and SEO-friendly titles or meta descriptions that align with your content.
View suggestions: You’ll see five unique suggestions for the title and meta description. Check them to see which ones suit your content the best. They are in the context of a Google SERP result. You can immediately see how it might look in the search results.
Choose or refresh: Find a title or meta description you love? Wonderful! Select it and click the ‘Apply AI title/meta description’ button next to the selection, and it will automatically populate the appropriate fields. Not entirely satisfied with the first round of suggestions? No problem! Click the ‘Generate more’ button, and five fresh suggestions for titles and meta descriptions will appear.
Finalize: The generated titles and meta descriptions are not set in stone. Tweak them to your liking.
Remember, there’s no need for any configuration. It also doesn’t cost you anything extra, like AI credits or an extra subscription — it’s all included in Yoast SEO Premium.
Keep Google in mind
Even as you use our AI feature to create SEO meta tags, it’s worth remembering that Google often rewrites titles and meta descriptions. This process is based on their algorithms’ understanding of your content and what they consider will be most helpful to users.
What does this mean? Google’s systems serve the user the best content according to their search query, which means it will occasionally adjust your titles and meta descriptions. This fact underlines the importance of your on-page content aligning with your meta tags.
Something else to keep in mind
While our generative AI is a powerful tool designed to deliver high-quality, SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions, we want to remind you that it doesn’t replace the human touch. The technology provides incredible choices by learning from your data, but it might only partially grasp the unique context, branding, or tone of voice your content requires.
The suggestions generated by our AI feature provide a solid foundation for your SEO data, saving you time and effort. However, it’s still important to review these suggestions to ensure they align with your brand’s voice and your content’s context and are factually correct. We have a blog post explaining how to evaluate the generated titles and meta descriptions.
The power of generative AI in SEO is immense, offering time-saving benefits and efficiency; still, the technology should complement human intelligence, not replace it. We ensured that Yoast SEO 21.0 allows and encourages you to review, refine, and tailor the AI’s output.
Stay involved in the process, use this tool to enhance your workflow, and remember — the magic truly happens when human creativity and advanced AI work together!
Get Yoast SEO 21.0 now
We can’t wait for you to dive in and use this helpful feature in Yoast SEO Premium. We firmly believe it has the potential to improve your SEO work and make it more efficient. It helps free up that valuable time to do what you do best — create fantastic content.
The update is free if you use the Premium version of our SEO plugin. If you’re not a Premium subscriber, upgrade today to enjoy this and many more advanced features to help your SEO.
We’re excited about this new chapter in simplifying and optimizing your SEO work. As always, we are open to feedback and suggestions about Yoast SEO, and we’re looking forward to hearing about your experiences with this new feature.
Get ready to harness the power of AI for your SEO efforts!
The latest update of our plugin is here: Yoast SEO 20.13. This release is packed with crucial fixes that improve your SEO workflow. We’ve focused on enhancing compatibility and performance, making your SEO efforts smoother and more effective. So, let’s dive into the details of our latest release.
Compatibility with WordPress 6.3
Today, the new version of WordPress will be released. This WordPress 6.3 release would cause a small issue in the form of a design overlap in Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Insight preview pop-ups when using our plugin. That’s why today’s Yoast SEO release comes with a fix for this compatibility issue. We understand how important these previews are for your workflow, as they allow you to see how your content will appear on these platforms. With this fix, you can continue to enjoy a seamless preview experience, ensuring your content always looks its best.
We’ve also made improvements to the Premium version of our plugin. We’ve fixed a performance issue on hosts with limited object caching that was caused by autoloading of redirect data. This enhancement means faster loading times and a smoother user experience.
Update to Yoast SEO 20.13
These updates are designed to make your SEO efforts more efficient. This allows you to focus on what truly matters: creating quality content that resonates with your audience. We encourage you to update to the latest version of Yoast SEO. Not only will you benefit from these enhancements, but you’ll also be equipped with the most up-to-date SEO tools to optimize your website effectively.
We’re committed to continuously improving our plugin, ensuring it remains your go-to SEO solution. Thank you for your continued support and trust in Yoast SEO. We can’t wait to see how these updates will help you take your website’s SEO to new heights.
Video SEO 14.8
In other news, we’re also releasing a new version of our Video SEO add-on that comes with some bug fixes. It contains a fix for a few of our users (with large websites) that got a timeout when reindexing. We also fixed a few other bugs that some users with specific situations encountered, so make sure to update if you are a user of Video SEO!
Sneak peek at our upcoming Yoast SEO release…
At the moment we are still dotting the i’s, but we’re working on something awesome in Yoast SEO and are bursting to share it with you! It’s almost ready to go, so keep an eye on our upcoming release post and for now, see what you can make of this short teaser:
Building trust and establishing authority has become paramount for most online publishers. As Google strives to deliver the most reliable and high-quality content to users — especially in the age of generative AI, they have emphasized a concept known as E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. E-E-A-T serves as a critical framework to evaluate the credibility and reliability of websites and their content. Improving your E-E-A-T can solidify your position as a trusted authority in your field. Yoast SEO Premium now has a tool to help you work on that.
Yoast SEO Premium helps improve E-E-A-T
Google looks at your site from all angles to help determine its expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. There are so many options for you to point Google to the right places so it can quickly find what it needs to verify all that. For instance, your publishing principles pages provide excellent insights for Google. In today’s release of Yoast SEO Premium, we’ll enhance these pages via structured data.
Publishing principles are guidelines that govern the creation and dissemination of content. They encompass accuracy, integrity, relevance, transparency, engagement, privacy, accessibility, continuous improvement, and legal compliance. Following these principles ensures high-quality, trustworthy content that resonates with users.
Adhering to publishing principles establishes credibility and expertise, improves user satisfaction, and positively impacts SEO by enhancing E-E-A-T.
There’s structured data for that: publishingPrinciples
Yoast SEO Premium has new options to help Google find those all-important pages. We also make sure to add the publishingPrinciples schema to it so it’s instantly recognizable as such for search engines.
Head to the Site basics settings in Yoast SEO and scroll down to the Site policies section. Here, you can find different options for publishing principles, like:
General publishing principles
Funding information
Corrections policy
Ethics policy
Diversity policy
And more…
Select the appropriate pages from the fields, and you are ready. If you don’t have policies, this might be a good time to start writing those!
Adding publishing principles with Yoast SEO Premium
Update now to Yoast SEO 20.11
In Yoast SEO 20.11, we’ve added a new notification that reminds you to optimize recently added content types. You’ll not only see a notification on your dashboard, but we’ve also added a label to the content types to make them easily recognizable as new.
In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve added a new option to add your publishing principles to your site. Select them from the options, and we’ll add the proper schema. This makes it easier for Google to find and recognize your essential principles, which helps your E-E-A-T!
We are excited to present Yoast SEO 20.10, a release dedicated to fine-tuning your website and delivering an even smoother experience for all our fantastic users. This update focuses on fixing bugs and implementing minor enhancements to ensure your SEO journey is flawless. We’ve added a support section that gives you quick access to helpful content, while Premium subscribers can contact our dedicated support team.
A brand-new support section
At Yoast, we deeply value our users and understand the importance of reliable, responsive support. With Yoast SEO 20.10, we’ve made it easier for you to access the help you need, empowering you to optimize your website and achieve outstanding results confidently.
The latest release of Yoast SEO offers a new support page. Here, you’ll find options to get answers to all your burning questions quickly. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced pro, you’ll find a wealth of resources on our site to guide you through the intricacies of SEO optimization.
If you subscribe to Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll find an option to contact our support team instantly. Unlock unlimited 24/7 premium support and take your SEO to new heights by signing up for Yoast SEO Premium now!
Yoast SEO 20.10 introduces a new support section
Fixes and enhancements
In Yoast SEO 20.10, we’ve squashed numerous bugs that might have been causing a few hiccups along the way. Building stable foundations is crucial for your success, and we’re committed to providing you with a top-notch, bug-free experience. Of course, we’ve also added some interesting enhancements to our product.
For instance, we’ve expanded the list of HTML elements excluded from the content analysis to ensure these don’t influence the scores. In addition, we’ve introduced more robust HTML processing for the competing links, keyphrase in introduction, image keyphrase, and images assessments. Lastly, you can find a new option in the crawl optimization settings. This new one lets you block AdsBot crawling when enabled.
You can now block Google AdsBot from crawling — if you don’t use Google Ads, that is
Update now to Yoast SEO 20.10
Upgrade to Yoast SEO 20.10 today and experience the updated stability and fine-tuned enhancements. We appreciate your feedback, and we’re confident that this release will bring you peace of mind and increased optimization capabilities. Let’s take your SEO goals to new heights together as we continue to refine and perfect Yoast SEO.
Every two weeks, we bring you a new release of Yoast SEO. Today is no different! In Yoast SEO 20.7, we bring you a round of fixes and enhancements. In this week’s Yoast SEO Premium release, we’ve added a new feature to help you discover your all-important cornerstone content articles in the WordPress post overview.
Yoast SEO Premium: Find your cornerstone content quickly
As you know, cornerstone content is the most critical content on your website. They are typically lengthy, informative pages that cover a topic from all angles. Cornerstone content helps to establish your website’s authority and expertise in your field, and it usually attracts a lot of traffic over time.
However, creating and managing high-quality cornerstone content can be daunting, and that’s where Yoast SEO comes in. Yoast SEO helps you optimize your cornerstone content for search engines, ensuring that it ranks well in the search results and attracts the right traffic. By leveraging Yoast SEO’s guidance and best practices, you can create compelling content that drives traffic and builds authority and reputation.
In Yoast SEO Premium 20.7, we’ve made it easier to find your cornerstone in the post overview of WordPress. An additional column, identified by the pyramid icon, highlights which posts you marked as cornerstones in Yoast SEO. Of course, you can filter the list by clicking on the pyramid icon.
In the screenshot, you’ll also notice the numbers and the icons with arrows pointing in and out of a document. This link counter tracks how many internal links point to a post and how many internal links point away from the post to other articles on your site.
Track the number of internal links going to and from your cornerstone content, plus a new column for easily recognizing them
Zapier integration ends today
In Yoast SEO 20.6, we gave you a heads-up about the upcoming end of the Zapier integration. With today’s release of Yoast SEO 20.7, we are formally ending support for our Zapier integration. This will impact you if you rely on the integration, as existing Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will stop working for you if you update to version 20.7 or higher.
Yoast SEO academy is an excellent resource if you want to learn how to optimize your site for search engines and to drive more traffic to it. And the best part is that you get free access to all the courses when you sign up for Yoast SEO Premium!
With Yoast SEO academy, you can access a comprehensive library of SEO courses and training materials. These resources cover keyword research, site structure, content creation, and more. You’ll learn the theory and practical application of SEO strategies essential for higher search engine rankings.
In Yoast SEO 20.7, we’ve made accessing and discovering all these excellent educational materials easier. You can find all your SEO courses in the new academy section in one spot. And with access included in Yoast SEO Premium, there’s no reason not to take advantage of this valuable resource!
Yoast SEO 20.7 is out now
Yoast SEO 20.7 is available for download as of now, so go get it! In this release, you can find several fixes and enhancements. In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve added a new column to the post overview in WordPress to help you find your cornerstone content easily.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
