Tag: Software Releases & Updates

Yoast SEO 12.7 is out today — signaling the last release of 2019. This release is all about cleaning up and fixing bugs. Since we have a two-week release schedule, we can quickly respond to any bug we might find. In this post, you’ll find out more about this release. Plus, you can get Yoast SEO Premium for cheap in our Holiday Calendar sale: today only!

On the importance of bug fixing

We’ve always prided ourselves in releasing a product of high quality. Unfortunately, issues do pop up and we do our best to solve these depending on the severity of the issue. This is one of the reasons we have a two-week release schedule. For some, it might feel we release way too often, but for us, this is a great way to get fixes out as quickly as possible, without having to resort to patch releases. Having a good system in place for handling and resolving bugs is one of the pillars of coding awesome, stable software.

Every release, we fix a number of bugs from our backlog, plus a selection of new ones that need attention. In Yoast SEO 12.7, we also fixed a couple of bugs with the input of Saša Todorović. These concerned a bug where sub-sitemaps were rendered for non-public custom post types, plus a bug where nested gallery images were not included in the image count in the sitemap. In addition to the bug fixes, we improved the security of the plugin by adding output escaping.

Save 25% on Yoast SEO Premium: today only!

This holiday season, we’re counting down with an awesome holiday calendar. Each day, you get a nice surprise — ranging from free webinars to discount on Yoast products. December 10 — which is today! —, you’ll get a whopping 25% discount on Yoast SEO Premium. Now is the time to get acquainted with features that’ll help save time and improve your work, such as:

• the redirect manager,
• the internal linking suggestions,
• word form, synonym and related keywords support.

Of course, with Yoast SEO Premium you’ll also get access to our awesome support team.

Update now to Yoast SEO 12.7

That’s it for this release of Yoast SEO. We’ve fixed a number of bugs and cleaned up the code to make Yoast SEO perform even better. Don’t forget to take advantage of today’s discount on Yoast SEO Premium! It’ll surely help you kick-start your new year! 

The post Yoast SEO 12.7: Cleaning up and fixing bugs + sale! appeared first on Yoast.

In Yoast SEO 12.6, we’re activating our new beacon for help documentation. This tool helps answer the questions you might have about using Yoast SEO. It’s easy to use and very friendly. Just hit that big purple question mark and search! Other improvements in Yoast SEO 12.6 includes a number of fixes and enhancements. Read on to find out more.

New way of helping you 

Our previous help center was not always as apt to provide the best answers to your questions. In Yoast SEO 12.6, we’ve removed the old help center and in its place added a beacon powered by HelpScout. This beacon — you’ll notice the big purple question mark in the lower right-hand corner —, is quick, smart and very helpful.

The new beacon allows us to present not only helpful articles for our knowledge base, but also from our SEO blog, for instance. This lets you not only access a ton of information about what you are working on, but also provides you with enough context to explain why you are doing this — or why the plugin does what it does.

So if you search for something in the new beacon, you’re searching all the content we have. Hopefully, the results will be satisfactory! In addition, Yoast SEO Premium subscribers can contact our support team from the beacon. Please let us know what you think. The beacon is now available in all our plugins.

Fixes and enhancements

Today, we’re updating all our SEO plugins. For Yoast SEO, we’re continuing our work on several larger projects and focussing on behind-the-scenes improvements in 12.6. In addition, we’ve fixed several bugs and added a couple of enhancements, like the aforementioned help beacon. 

Other notable changes are the new description property we’ve added to the schema’s WebSite node. This means your site’s tagline can now be part of your site’s graph, giving search engines extra context about it. We’ve improved the Meta Robots Advanced field in the advanced section of the metabox by simplifying the options and wording around that feature.

Chris Thompson helped us fix a PHP Warning that pops up when using an empty string in the OpenGraph frontend output. We’ve also upped some of our requirements. We’ve set the minimum required WordPress version to 5.2, and the minimum PHP version to 5.6.20. Last but not least, we now show a notification to encourage Internet Explorer 11 users to use another browser as we are no longer supporting that browser.

Yoast SEO 12.6: update now

That’s Yoast SEO 12.6 in a nutshell. We’ve ironed out some kinks and introduced a massively enhanced help center based on beacons. Please update to the latest version whenever you’re ready!

The post Yoast SEO 12.6: Getting help in the plugin is now easier appeared first on Yoast.

These last couple of months here at Yoast SEO HQ have all been about building better things. Behind the scenes, we’re making good progress at getting our flagship plugins ready for the future. While we’re busy building the future, we also stick to our regular two-week release schedule, which means it’s time to introduce Yoast SEO 12.5.

Fixing bugs and behind the scenes scaffolding

Yoast SEO 12.5 is one where most of the work went on behind the scenes. We’re working on improving our codebase and will be releasing something cool pretty soon. To get that done, we need to do some cleaning up. 

Besides getting ready for future releases, we’ve fixed a number of bugs. One of those bugs happened for terms where keywords and snippet preview data would be synced across all languages in a MultilingualPress multisite environment. Another bug misplaced visually hidden text in several elements inside the Snippet Preview. We’ve also deprecated the old Search Console integration as that won’t be returning in that same shape or form.

A reminder about support for older versions of WordPress 

With yesterday’s release of WordPress 5.3, we will return to our initial position of only supporting the latest two versions of WordPress. In this case, that’s WordPress 5.2 and WordPress 5.3, and not versions before that. This means we’ll end our support for WordPress 4.9, which we’ve supported longer than usual to allow people to transition to WordPress 5.0 and ease over people to the classic editor or block editor. Luckily, the vast majority of you have probably updated to the latest versions.

In WordPress 5.2, the core team upped the minimum PHP requirements from an ancient 5.2 to the slightly less ancient 5.6. By supporting the last two versions of WordPress, we can now develop our software using PHP 5.6. This means that we can develop faster and more securely. Read Joost’s post on supporting older versions of WordPress.

Update now to Yoast SEO 12.5

Yoast SEO 12.5 is a fairly basic release with lots of stuff going on in the background. We’ve fixed a number bugs and helped Yoast SEO get ready for future improvements.

The post Yoast SEO 12.5: Behind the scenes improvements appeared first on Yoast.

After releasing several updates to our snippet preview in previous releases, Yoast SEO 12.4 now shows an image for your post in the mobile snippet preview, just like Google would. We have several other improvements and fixes for you in store with Yoast SEO 12.4. Find out more!

Featured image in the mobile snippet preview

Not too long ago, Google made several changes in the way they present results on mobile. To mimic that, we started updating our snippet preview. In the latest iteration, we see a favicon (added in Yoast SEO 11.5, enhanced in 12.1) and new font sizes (added in 12.1).

The one thing missing from the current snippet preview in Yoast SEO is that of an image. For some search results on mobile, Google will now show the main image next to it. In Yoast SEO 12.4, we automatically use your featured image to mimic the way Google does this now. We’ll use the first image in your content if you haven’t set a featured image. Remember, this only works in the mobile snippet preview.

Schema structured data content blocks

Our Schema structured data content blocks for the block editor have proven to be a valid way to quickly get rich results for these types of content. The two current content blocks, namely FAQ and HowTo blocks, are incredibly easy to add, update and publish. They give you valid structured data for that content and thus a great chance of getting rich results. Be sure to try them out! In Yoast SEO 12.4, we’ve improved the findability of the blocks in the block editor library to help even more people find and use them.

Fixes and enhancements

For this release, we had several users contributions. Emily Leffler Schulman suggested to change the readability score for empty content from “Needs Improvement” with a red icon to “Not Available” with a gray icon. This makes it less confronting for users. Emily also updated the URLs used to ping Google and Bing about the location of a sitemap. Steven Franks added information to the Twitter settings to make it more clear why you should enable Open Graph. Thanks both!

We also fixed a number of bugs in this release. One of these bugs made it impossible to set Twitter and Facebook images for attachment pages. Another bug concerned the visibility of a nested paragraph in the “noindex” metabox warning. Plus, we clear up the last of the Google+ data, there was still some leftovers in the settings export.

Update to Yoast SEO 12.4

That’s Yoast SEO 12.4 for you! We’ve updated the mobile snippet preview with the latest changes by Google and we fixed several bugs. A number enhancements makes Yoast SEO a little bit easier to use. Update to the latest version at your convenience!

The post Yoast SEO 12.4: Image in snippet preview appeared first on Yoast.

While some of our checks are independent of languages, Yoast SEO has special skills to adapt the various content analyses to different languages from around the world. In Yoast SEO 12.3, we’re taking the first steps to add another language to the list: Hungarian. In addition, this release features a number of enhancement and fixes. Read on to find out more!

Yoast SEO is learning a new language: Hungarian

Every time we plan on adding a language, we need to see how and what we need to do to get it to work in the plugin. Not every language follows the same rules, so we do research and test how to best go about adding a new one. We have a team of linguists, assistants and developers doing the hard work. Their team lead, Manuel Augustin, recently wrote a post describing how we make Yoast SEO understand your language.

That’s not to say we do everything by ourselves. We truly value community input and we need it if we want to reach our goals. In this release, you’ll see one of those community efforts. Thanks to the hard work of 9abor, we can now say our first words in Hungarian! We start off by adding support for the transition word assessment for this language. More to come.

On our knowledge base, you can find the complete list of all available languages and a guide on how you can make Yoast SEO available in your language.

Other fixes and improvements

Yoast SEO 12.3 features a number of fixes and enhancements. In Yoast SEO Premium, we fixed a bug that prevented you from interrupting the internal linking tool during updating. We’ve improved user input validation feedback and suggestions for error correction.

Plus, we’ve added a new floating Save changes button on Yoast SEO admin pages. You’ll this when the normal button isn’t visible in the browser window. We’ve added a new filter called wpseo_sitemap_http_headers which allows filtering the HTTP headers we send for XML sitemaps. Last but not least, Weston Ruter added a code change to add the CSS for the Yoast SEO admin bar to the AMP dev mode. This makes sure that the CSS will always load properly, even if there is a lot of CSS on a page.

Update now to Yoast SEO 12.3

Yoast SEO 12.3 is out today and brings a number of improvements. We’ve started to add support for a new language, namely Hungarian. In addition, we’ve improved input validation and added some changes that will help the admin bar load at all times. Hope you enjoy this release!

The post Yoast SEO 12.3: Transition words in Hungarian appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 12.2 is a release full of the regular bug fixes and enhancements, but also a new addition to meta robots. Last week, Google announced a new way to give publishers more control over what the search engine can show in the results. This change, however, seems not driven by customer demand, but rather by law. Find out what this is all about and why we chose to automatically opt sites in for this.

Adding a line in meta robots

Google is turning to the meta robots tag to comply with a new European copyright law. Previously, publishers had to explicitly opt out if they wanted to prevent Google from using their content to present it in search results. Thanks to the new European copyright law, we see Google asking sites to opt in if they want it to use their content, images and videos in snippets. France is the first to roll out its version of this copyright law, starting today.

“When the French law comes into force, we will not show preview content in France for a European news publication unless the publisher has taken steps to tell us that’s what they want.” — Google’s Richard Gingras on the French Google blog.

While it currently “only” impacts several hundred publishers in France, it’s not hard to predict that more countries might roll out similar laws and implementations. This may even reach beyond just news sites in Google News. As this development potentially affects many countries, we’ve decided to make a change for all Yoast SEO users.

We will add the following line to the robots meta tag on every page unless that page was already set to noindex or nosnippet:

max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1

By adding this piece of code, we make sure that every site using Yoast SEO is automatically opting in for this change. Now, you’ll be ready for the implementation of this law in Europe and your content will continue to appear in Google search results.

Read Joost’s post on what this change means for Google, for us and the web.

Enhancements and fixes: plus, free courses!

There’s more of course, with the majority being bug fixes. We’ve updated the configuration wizard that helps you set up Yoast SEO. We’ve combined some steps and added a reminder to take our free Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training.

Did you say free? Yes, I did! Everyone can now learn everything there is to learn about the #1 WordPress SEO plugin by the people who built it. There’s lots to discover, but it’s all very easy to learn. Go try it! While you’re in the Yoast SEO Academy, you might as well check out our other brand-new, free course: WordPress for beginners.

Find out all the changes in the changelog for Yoast SEO 12.2.

Update to Yoast SEO 12.2

This release focuses mainly on fixing bugs, but also introduces a new meta robots tag. This tag automatically opts in sites for Google to continue to use their content like text, images and videos in the snippets. It is a change driven by a new European copyright law that goes into effect in France first, with many countries expected to follow in the near future.

The post Yoast SEO 12.2: Fixes, improvements and more appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 12.1 is out today! It features a couple of changes in order to match the design of Google’s search results pages, this includes those shiny new favicons. In addition to this, we added a number of new filters for our Schema implementation. See what else is new in the latest release of your favorite SEO plugin.

Updating the snippet preview

Google is always testing different iterations of its search results pages. Sometimes a test sticks and ends up as the new default. In Yoast SEO 12.1, we’re adapting our snippet preview to match two of the latest changes: favicon in mobile search and new font sizes in desktop search.

In Yoast SEO 11.5, we added the default favicon Google uses when it can’t detect a correct favicon on your site — or you simply don’t have one. Now, we pick the one you’ve added to WordPress and show it right in the mobile snippet preview, just like Google would. You now have a good sense of how your site will appear in the mobile search results.

Here’s how to add a favicon to your WordPress site in order to get it to show in both search results as well as our mobile snippet preview.

The other new tidbit we have for you is matching Google’s new font sizes for the desktop search results. Google now uses slightly larger letters and we’ve followed suit to make the desktop snippet preview appear exactly right. Go check it out.

New Schema filters

We’ve added a couple of new filters to allow for a more granular control over a site’s Schema output. Julià Mestieri suggested the first one. He made a filter called wpseo_schema_organization_social_profiles to filtering an organization’s social profiles in the schema output. You can use this filter to modify social profiles (sameAs attribute) in the Organization schema object.

Andrew Gillingham suggested two other filters. His wpseo_schema_company_name and wpseo_free_schema_company_logo_idfilters make it possible to filter the company name and company logo from the theme options whenever it hasn’t been set in the Yoast SEO settings. This way, both can still be used by the schema output without having to set it manually.

Last but not least, we added a filter called wpseo_enable_structured_data_blocks that makes it possible to turn off Yoast’s structured data block editor blocks.

Find out all about our structured data implementation and how you can enhance it by reading our Schema documentation.

Other improvements

The WordPress Gutenberg project keeps chugging along nicely, but sometimes stuff changes or breaks. In one of the latest releases, our structured data content blocks hit a little snafu, which we fixed in this release. The styling of the How-to and FAQ blocks is now compatible with latest version of the WordPress blocks editor.

Our latest community additions are a new method suggested by Brady Williams and a bug fix by David Herrera. Brady’s get_robots method retrieves the robot HTML without it being output, while David fixed a bug where the primary term selector would not display HTML entities properly.

As mentioned in the Yoast SEO 12.0 release post, we’re actively working on improving input validation in the plugin, among many other things. We’ve continued that in Yoast SEO 12.1 and improved the validation on the settings page. We’ve also updated the plugin icons to be more consistent.

Update now to Yoast SEO 12.1

That’s it for Yoast SEO 12.1! We’ve updated our snippet preview to the latest changes by Google, including those shiny favicons in the mobile search results. We’ve added new Schema filters, fixed several bugs and rolled out several other enhancements. Go test the new version and update whenever you’re ready!

The post Yoast SEO 12.1: Snippet preview updated appeared first on Yoast.

Contrary to what the version number might suggest, Yoast SEO 12.0 isn’t a huge release. It’s simply the next release in our current release schedule, but after hitting 11.9 a couple of weeks ago we had no choice but to go for 12.0. That’s how it goes! But don’t worry, there’s enough interesting stuff in this release, including two new checks for the Portuguese language.

Continuing UX improvements

Over the past couple of release, we’ve been steadily improving the way we handle validation. In the past, it wasn’t always clear if the stuff you input in fields was formatted the way it should. There wasn’t too much feedback from the plugin. We’re now actively improving this and looking at each field to see what should go in there. So if something should be a URL, we now verify that what you enter is really formatted as a URL. No longer can you add gibberish in the fields!

In the same vain, we are now updating the document title in the settings whenever we find something wrong with a form. The W3C suggests this technique as a way of improving the accessibility of a page. One of the first things a screen reader encounters on a page is the <title>, so now it can read that to find errors on a page. It can now read these out loud to notify the user. Great, right?

We’ve also improved the wording in several places to make it more clear what something means. For instance, Emily Leffler Schulman suggested to improve the feedback the plugin shows when you haven’t set a focus keyphrase for a post. It used to show a grey Yoast icon with the not very helpful line: SEO: Not available. We’ve changed that to Focus Keyphrase not set. Much more helpful. Don’t forget people: set your focus keyphrase.

The last UX change we’d like to highlight is limiting the width of the meta box. This change, suggested by Louise Ann Apostol, makes sure that the meta box doesn’t overstretch on very large screens.

Portuguese language SEO improvements

As you know, most of our content checks work for every language out there. But some parts of our readability checks are tailored for different languages as not every language is interchangable. We currently support a whole slew of languages in some form or another. We have listed the languages and the features each language supports.

In Yoast SEO 12.0, thanks to Dilmar Ames, we’ve enhanced our support for the Portuguese language. We now support two new checks for Portuguese:

• Consecutive sentences check: this is the assessment that checks whether multiple sentences in a row begin with the same word;
• Sentence length check: this assessment checks the length of your sentences to warn you if you use too many long sentences.

We are hard at work adding new languages and improving the ones we already support. Don’t see your language yet? Hang tight, we might get there soon.

Update now to Yoast SEO 12.0

While Yoast SEO 12.0 is not the huge release you might expect if you see that version number, it’s a nice release with quite a few improvements. Please update to the latest version when you are ready.

Thanks for using Yoast SEO!

The post Yoast SEO 12.0: UX improvements and new Portuguese checks appeared first on Yoast.

Are you ready for another exciting release to round up the Yoast SEO 11 cycle? Because we are! In Yoast SEO 11.9, we have improvements for Schema and security, we have bug fixes and updates for Local and News SEO!

Improving Schema once again

With the closing of the Yoast SEO 11 releases we’ve yet again improved Schema in the plugins! The Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin had a bug showing invalid Schema when a product used the placeholder image, so we fixed that. We’ve also improved Schema output in the News SEO plugin.

With Yoast SEO 12.0 around the corner, you might fear that we think we’re done with Schema output in the Yoast SEO plugins. Fortunately, this is not the case! We’ll continue to improve and work on Schema in future releases as well.

Curious for more Schema? Looking for a way to extend our Schema implementation? Why don’t you dive into our Schema documentation?

Tightening the security of the plugins

Somehow security is something people find not very interesting. But you do lock up your house when you leave it because you don’t want anyone to steal your tv, right? Updating to the latest version of a plugin is essentially locking your website to make sure no one can get in. A criminal does not need an open door, an open window or even thin glass won’t stop them. It’s the same with software: they don’t need a password to maybe do malicious things to your website. That’s why we always give high priority to possible security issues in our plugins. For this release, the incomparable Juliette Reinders -Folmer — helped us improve the security of the plugins to make sure there won’t be possible malicious data.

Local SEO improvements

We’ve updated our Local SEO plugin, because Google went from two different API keys to just one. New users of the Local SEO plugin will see a field in the API key tab where they can enter their API key. Existing users can add their API keys the regular way, but we encourage you to use the new API key.

Local SEO now also gives you notifications when you have set an API key in a constant in your wp-config.php file. In addition, we fixed a bug that caused the map settings tab to show an empty panel without an API key present. It now shows a notification.

News SEO improvements

We gave the News SEO plugin quite some love this release! The add-on now has its own tab in the Yoast SEO meta box.

We’ve also fixed a bug where the @type in the schema output would be NewsArticle instead of Article for articles which were excluded from the news sitemap. And we’ve fixed a bug where news article pages and custom post types included in the news sitemap, would not receive an author in the schema output.

Bug fixes in Yoast SEO 11.9

In Yoast SEO for WordPress, we’ve fixed a bug where the image from the configuration wizard notification was missing an empty alt attribute. No need to read that sentence again, we’ll explain what this means! In absence of an alt attribute, screen readers will try to announce something to you. This means in most cases the screen readers will try to announce a part of the image URL, which is far from ideal. Decorative images need an empty alt and that’s what this fixes!

Another bug we squashed concerned missing translations from the meta box, sidebar, configuration wizard and the help center. We love our translators and it’s much easier to read the information in your native language.

Bug fixes in Yoast SEO Premium

In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve fixed a bug where multiple redirects would be created when editing taxonomies on a multisite environment. In addition, the social preview forms no longer appears on taxonomies twice. We love social media, but there’s no need to let you fill in those forms multiple times.

Update to Yoast SEO 11.9

That’s it! We’re very proud to deliver the last release of the Yoast SEO 11 cycle. Don’t forget to update!

The post Yoast SEO 11.9: More fixes and enhancements appeared first on Yoast.

Release history tells us that the releases in the months of July and August are usually very quiet. Due to vacations from team members, the focus usually lies on fixing bugs and cleaning up. Not for Yoast SEO 11.8! This new release gives you an enhanced meta box, an improved Schema output and bug fixes, some of which powered by contributors from outside the company! Here, we’ll tell you everything about the all-new Yoast SEO.

Meta box enhancements

The observing Yoast SEO user might have already noticed the changes in the plugin’s meta box the past few releases. In this all-new release, we’ve updated the meta box once more! The advanced tab has been moved to the SEO tab – you’ll find it as a collapsible header now – and the social settings have been updated as well. This is how the meta box looks right now:

We’ve also fixed a bug where the snippet title and meta description fields would still be left-to-right when the website was set to a right-to-left language.

Bug fixes

Of course, we’ve fixed more bugs! In Yoast SEO Premium we’ve fixed a bug where RegEx redirects that started with a forward slash could not be deleted.

And thanks to contributors, Yoast SEO 11.8 also fixes a bug where the plugin used the WP_query->get_posts() function wrong. This could cause the return of wrong results. So, good job, contributors! And that’s not the only contributor fix; find them all in the Yoast SEO changelog!

On top of this, we’ve fixed a bug in Video SEO. You can find the entire changelog here.

Schema updates: we’ve got them!

Were you waiting for the Schema updates again? We’ve got that covered for you!

A quick recap: in Yoast SEO 11.7 we’ve added a subset of HTML tags for the HowTo and FAQ blocks when creating a post. Among those, is the ability to link to other posts. When Google shows your HowTo or FAQ block as a rich search result, they might also display the internal links you added. This way, you can get more people to click through to your content directly, instead of just giving them the full answer in Google search results.

In Yoast SEO 11.8, we’ve also improved the sanitization of the Schema output. This means that with this new update, the plugin has become even more secure.

Contributor Emily Leffler Schulman

Recently, we’ve received no less than 9 contributions from Yoast SEO user Emily Leffler Schulman. At Yoast, we understand why contributing to open source projects is important and it seems like Emily shares the same philosophy as we do! We’ve asked her several questions that might be on the tip of your tongue as well.

Emily is a freelance WordPress and UI developer, and she’s a true problem solver: she works with small business, associations, and universities. You can find more about her on her website.

When asked why she decided to contribute to Yoast, she answered: “Open source projects offer such an amazing opportunity to learn and expand in a team environment. After freelancing for over a decade, I’d found that the technical skills I needed to collaborate with other developers were becoming atrophied so I started contributing to WordPress plugins to stay fresh. Yoast SEO has been a mainstay of every site I’ve built, so it made sense to work on something that was both familiar and valuable to me. ”

She uses Yoast SEO for everything and is a frequent visitor of the Yoast blog as well: “Yoast’s blog posts are really helpful reference material for explaining SEO techniques to my clients in laymen’s terms and the developer portal is a professional go-to for staying abreast of changes in the SEO ecosystem. I’m so impressed by how supportive and positive Yoast’s contributor community is.”

Want to contribute to Yoast SEO?

Do you want to contribute to Yoast SEO just like Emily or the other contributors do? Emily has one last tip for you:

“Just do it! If you’re into making things, open source projects are a great way to give back to something awesome.”

At Yoast, we’d love to be able to write your name in our changelog as well!

Update to Yoast SEO 11.8!

Yoast SEO 11.8 is out now and as always, you can update this through your website’s dashboard. Go update!

The post Yoast SEO 11.8: Improving Yoast SEO with the help of the community appeared first on Yoast.