Yoast SEO Premium v18.8
v18.8 - June 28th, 2022
In Yoast SEO Premium 18.8, we’re expanding our recently introduced crawl settings with search spam blockers and URL parameters cleanup. In addition, we’re adding an integration with IndexNow to instantly ping search engines like Microsoft Bing whenever you publish or update content. Check it out! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO Premium 18.8 in our release post in English or our release post in Spanish!
Enhancements:
- Enhances the Crawl settings with new features which allow filtering out long phrases, emojis, special characters and other patterns from searches, to prevent search spam.
- Enhances the Crawl settings with new features which allow filtering out campaign tracking and unregistered parameters from URLs, to redirect visitors and crawlers to the cleaned-up permalink.
- Adds a feature that allows pinging IndexNow to make sure newly published and/or changed URLs are indexed by Bing, Yandex, Seznam and other search engines more rapidly.
Other:
- Bumps minimum required Free version to 19.2.
Yoast SEO v19.2
19.2 - June 28th, 2022
Yoast SEO 19.2 is out today! In this release, we’ve rolled out some improvements to the content and SEO analyses and we’ve added an integration with WordProof to timestamp privacy pages on the blockchain. Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 19.2 in our release post in English or our release post in Spanish!
Enhancements:
- NEW: Adds an integration with WordProof, which allows for improving the trustworthiness of the privacy policy and terms and conditions pages by adding a timestamp.
- Adds support for webp images for OpenGraph output.
- Adds a notice that displays when Yoast SEO Premium is installed but not activated prompting the user to activate it.
- Adds a new filter wpseo_change_home_url that allows changing the URL checked by the Ryte integration, to support more versatile hosting setups.
- Adds a meta author tag to ensure that LinkedIn picks up the name of a post author properly.
- Adds the name of the article author to the author section of the Article schema piece, to ensure that Pinterest picks up the name of a post author properly.
- Enables sorting on the SEO and readability score columns on the post overview page.
- Ensures the Bing XML sitemap ping is only sent if IndexNow is disabled.
- Prevents XML sitemap pings for blogs that aren’t public.
- Improves the content analysis by excluding blockquote HTML elements.
- Improves the sentence recognition by disregarding abbreviations and initials as potential sentence boundaries.
- Improves the text analysis by not splitting sentences on semicolon ;.
- Improves the text analysis by supporting sentence detection for declarative sentences in quotation marks.
- Improves the text analysis in Elementor by not always splitting on ellipsis … regardless of whether the next sentence has a valid beginning or not.
Bugfixes:
- Fixes a bug that would cause the First-time configuration to crash when completing indexation with the Yoast admin bar menu hidden.
- Fixes a bug where filtering the OpenGraph and Twitter image to a URL containing ampersands would lead to encoding issues.
- Fixes a bug where HTML tags in the og:description meta tag would be displayed encoded instead of being removed completely.
- Fixes a bug where the sitemap image:loc URLs containing ampersands would lead to encoding issues.
- Fixes a bug where notices would show an abnormally large heading in Yoast SEO Premium page.
Other:
- Renames the ‘Keyphrase in title’ SEO assessment to ‘Keyphrase in SEO title’.