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Yoast SEO changelog

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16.8

Yoast SEO 16.8 is out today! This release comes with an updated readability analysis with support for two new languages: Norwegian and Slovak. Did you know that Yoast SEO is nearing language support for twenty languages? Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.8 in our release post!

16.7

Meet Yoast SEO 16.7! This release comes with extended support for headless WordPress. Yoast SEO comes with a REST API that developers can use to access our metadata in a headless WordPress installation. In Yoast SEO 16.7, we’re making more data available and also in a different format: JSON. Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.7 in our release post!

16.6.1

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where many Premium editor features would not work if Yoast SEO was updated to version 16.6 while Yoast SEO Premium was still on version 16.5 or lower.

16.6

Yoast SEO 16.6 comes with a new round of improvements and fixes. We’ve updated the analysis to exclude sentences inside tables and table captions from the consecutive sentences assessment. Enjoy! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.6 in our release post!

16.5

Yoast SEO 16.5 is out today! This release comes with a number of fixes and enhancements. For instance, easier social media settings, better understanding of the Turkish and Czech languages and improvements to the breadcrumbs schema output. Read all about it in our release post!

16.4

Meet Yoast SEO 16.4: This brand-new version of Yoast SEO comes with a rewritten language analysis, plus a newly supported language: Czech. People who write in this language can now fully use our tools to improve their content. We hope you enjoy this update! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.4 in our release post!

16.3

Out now: Yoast SEO 16.3! This release helps you with one of the key aspects of modern SEO: Structured data. Yoast SEO 16.3 comes with a lot of enhancements for the Schema.org implementation. Enjoy! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.3 in our release post!

16.1.1

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when creating a new Elementor template or editing an existing one.

16.0.2

Enhancements​

  • Changes the deactivation prevention text on the Plugins page from ‘Deactivate Yoast SEO Premium first’ to ‘Required by Yoast SEO Premium’ to avoid confusion.

16.0.1

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where in rare cases incorrect usage of WP_Query could lead to incorrect SEO data.

16.0

Yoast SEO 16.0: The Sweet Sixteen release is out! It comes with several fixes and improvements. Happy updating and thank you for using Yoast SEO! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.0 in our release post!

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where invalid breadcrumbs would show PHP warnings.
  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when a post ancestor was not an indexable.
  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when both Yoast SEO and Polylang for WooCommerce were installed, and the site contained WooCommerce variable products. Props to manooweb.

Other​

  • Sets the WordPress tested up to version to 5.7 and minimum supported WordPress version to 5.6.

15.9.2

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where the order of the robots values was suboptimal when running WordPress 5.7. Note that the order has no effect on how the values are interpreted.

15.9

Yoast SEO 15.9 is out! This release comes with performance improvements and general enhancements. Happy updating and thanks for using Yoast SEO! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 15.9 in our release post!

Enhancements​

  • Adds a preview of the chosen image for the organization and person image, social images, Facebook front page image and Facebook default image.
  • Improves interoperability and consistency in database queries.
  • Improves the performance by preventing database queries for the homepage indexable.

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where the disabled style of the switch toggles didn't look right.

15.6.2

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where notifications in the notification center would not be dismissible on sites using FastCGI.

15.6.1

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where the estimated reading time would not be shown when posts that were created before Yoast SEO 15.6 were shared on Slack.

Other​

  • Adjusts the default words per minute for the estimated reading time from 250 words per minute to 200 words per minute.

15.5

Out now: Yoast SEO 15.5! You can easily check if you are doing a great job in terms of the readability of your text when writing in Hungarian! Yoast SEO helps you produce a powerful piece of content that’s easy to read. It also gives you feedback on what to improve! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 15.5 in our release post!

15.4

It’s here: Yoast SEO 15.4! In this release, you’ll find a seamless, easy-to-use integration of Yoast SEO with Elementor. Building websites and optimizing content for the search engines now in one workflow! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 15.4 in our release post!

15.3

Out now: Yoast SEO 15.3! In this release, you’ll find full language support for Hebrew in our analysis! This makes it a lot more natural to optimize your posts and it lets you focus on the writing part. Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 15.3 in our release post!

15.2.1

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where AMP and W3C validation would break because Twitter meta tags would contain 'value' attributes instead of 'content' attributes.

15.2

Today, we are releasing Yoast SEO 15.2 into the wild. In this release, we've added an interesting improvement for Slack users — better visibility for your content when your URL is shared on Slack. We also improved the performance of the plugin in the backend due to us loading less JavaScript. Read more about what’s new in 15.2 in our release post!

15.1.1

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where the indexing button on the Tools page would keep showing up because certain objects would be detected as requiring indexing but would not actually be indexed during the indexing process.

15.1

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get keyword data while working on your content in Yoast SEO? Well, we asked ourselves that same question and now we have an answer! Yes, you can now find related keyphrases inside the post editor. And it’s not any old data — no, it’s powered by our good friends at SEMrush, a world-class provider of SEO and internet marketing tools! Read more about what’s new in 15.1 in our release post!

14.8.1

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug in WordPress itself where script concatenation was causing JavaScript errors, which in turn led to Yoast SEO malfunctioning. This bug was introduced in WordPress 5.5. We’re fixing it by disabling script concatenation entirely.

14.8

Get ready for a brand new version of Yoast SEO! In this version you'll find new Schema functionality, an improved readability analysis for Portuguese & Indonesian, and improved keyword recognition for right-to-left languages. Read more about those changes in our release post!

14.7

Say hi to Yoast SEO 14.7, chock-full of enhancements to help you with your site's SEO. Have you heard about the addition of XML sitemaps in WordPress 5.5? The Yoast SEO plugin is completely prepared for this. We also have some great news for users of the Web Stories plugin. Read more about those changes in our release post!

14.6.1

Other​

  • Reverts the change for social media titles to pick the post/page/term title, as this could inadvertently lead to low quality titles for some archives and other page types.

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where the where all methods were removed from xmlrpc.php due to incorrect usage of add_action as opposed to add_filter.

14.6

We have a new release for you: Yoast SEO 14.6. This release has some pretty cool enhancements. For example, we’ve added another helpful indicator in the editor that shows you your scores for a particular post quickly. Read more about those changes in our release post!

14.5

Yoast SEO 14.5 is out today! In this release, we made some changes regarding our use of XML sitemaps. We decided to disable the new WordPress core XML sitemaps in favour of our own. Also, we fixed a number of bugs. Read more about those changes in our release post!

Enhancements​

  • Disables the WP Core sitemaps as introduced in WordPress 5.5.
  • Adds an abstract class to easily add dynamic blocks in Yoast SEO / add-ons.

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where the SEO title and meta description for posts that have a custom title and/or description would not be displayed in the posts overview.
  • Fixes a bug where the WordPress dashboard was slower for very large sites, by caching the number of unindexed posts, terms and post type archives.
  • Fixes a bug where inline link functionality in custom blocks could be missing.

14.4.1

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where existing links were no longer editable with Yoast SEO active.
  • Fixes a bug where the editor wouldn't remember rel values set on a link after refresh.

14.4

Sometimes, you have releases that start out small and end up with a substantial improvement. Yoast SEO 14.4 is one such release. Initially planned as a bug fix release, this turned into something that markedly improves the publishing workflow in WordPress. Plus, you can now mark your external links as nofollow or sponsored. You see, Yoast SEO 14.4 is a chockfull release! Read more about those changes in our release post!

14.3

In every release of Yoast SEO, we fix bugs and find other ways to enhance our code. For instance, we’re always working on quality assurance, code style and other behind the scenes work. In Yoast SEO 14.3, you’ll find many of these improvements plus some bugfixes. Read more about those changes in our release post!

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where the FAQ schema list item's position would start at 0 instead of 1.
  • Fixes a bug where the filters wpseo_metadesc and wpseo_title weren't called with the right argument, which could lead to errors.
  • Fixes a bug where our global CSS variables could conflict with global CSS variables of themes.

14.2

In today's release, we’ve fixed several issues with breadcrumbs. One of these bugs turned the order of breadcrumbs on its head, which is not something we like. Things should work as expected now. We’ve also changed how we check if a focus keyphrase was used before. We currently run this against our indexable table, making the process more efficient. Read more about those changes in our release post!

14.0.4

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where robots meta values defaulted to 0 instead of null because of a bug in WPDB. This could result in incorrect values for noindex, nofollow , noarchive, noimageindex and/or nosnippet. In order to purge the wrong data, we need to truncate our tables again. This means you will have to go through the indexing process again. We’re very sorry. For sites with more than 10,000 posts, we advise using the WP CLI command to do the indexing on the server.

14.0.3

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where running the migrations could cause fatal errors on sites where plugins are installed remotely. Some remote plugin installers don't remove files that are removed in an update. Since our migration runner goes through all migrations on the server, this could lead to fatal errors.
  • Fixes a bug where the pre_get_document_title filter could be skipped when other plugins were using this filter as well.
  • Fixes a bug where an error would be thrown when the name of an indexable table had been converted to a different case.
  • Fixes a bug where a taxonomy parent would not be present in the breadcrumbs even though it was set in the breadcrumbs settings.

Enhancements​

  • Adds a missing index to the new indexables table. Props to @pagelypete.

Other​

  • Adds the wpseo_frontend_presentation filter that can be used by third-party plugins to easily alter all our meta output with 1 single filter.

14.0

Today is a special day. Today, a project we’ve been working on for a year sees the light of day. Yoast SEO 14.0 rewrites the playbook on how a WordPress SEO plugin can work. Thanks to an approach we call indexables, we bring you a much faster experience and a new foundation that helps us get ready for an exciting future! Read more about this release in our release post!

13.5

While we’re working on getting Yoast SEO 14.0 ready for the world, you can enjoy today’s release of Yoast SEO 13.5. Read all about Yoast SEO 13.5 in our release post!

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when saving a post while the type was no longer WP_Post due to filtering.
  • Fixes a bug where .xsl site map files would not be cached correctly.

Other​

  • Sets minimum supported WordPress version to 5.3.

13.4.1

Bugfixes​

  • Replaces the use of the deprecated category_link filter by term_link. Props to Chouby

13.4

In Yoast SEO 9.0, we launched an innovative new way to analyze your English language text using word forms. In Yoast SEO 10.1, we added word form support for the German language. Today, we’re glad to announce word form support for Dutch. You can read why this is such an awesome addition in our 13.4 release post!

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where the host part of URLs could contain reserved characters, like spaces and brackets. Props to stodorovic.
  • Fixes a bug where form fields were validated inconsistently.

13.3

Our current string of releases focusing on improving our code is continuing with Yoast SEO 13.3. In this release, we have a Schema structured data addition and several improvements to how Yoast SEO handles URLs. Read on in our 13.3 release post!

Enhancements​

  • Makes sure all URL fields show an unencoded URL after saving, even when the user input was encoded.
  • Requires all URLs in URL input fields to begin with either ‘/’ or ‘http(s)’. Props to stodorovic.
  • Adds a potentialAction entity to the WebPage and Article Schema pieces.

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug where social URLs containing international characters could not be saved. Props to stodorovic.
  • Fixes a bug where encoded characters would be stripped from canonical URLs. Props to stodorovic.

Other​

  • Changes the cURL Health Check category from recommended to critical.