YOAST SEO - Best Wordpress SEO Plugin v24.0

Yoast SEO Premium v21.9 - January 23, 2024
Yoast SEO Premium 21.9 is out now. This release is mainly focused on maintenance. It comes with many behind-the-scenes improvements and general enhancements. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO Premium 21.9 in our release post!
Bug fixes
Fixes a bug where Accordion and Tabs widgets in Elementor would not open a tab when clicking its header in the preview.
Fixes a bug where calling a deprecated function would lead to a fatal error.
Fixes a bug where the content analysis would not work properly when a related links block had been added.
Other
Adds a filter to suppress the notification shown in the block editor when a redirect is automatically created upon slug change.
Bumps the minimum required version of Yoast SEO to 21.9.
Make the required PHP extensions explicit.
Removes Yoast SEO from the Premium zip which reduces the zip size. Also automatically installs Yoast SEO from the WordPress.org repository if it's not present.
Sets the minimum supported WordPress version to 6.3.

January 9, 2024
Elementor users rejoice! Yoast SEO Premium 21.8 comes with functional highlighting within the Elementor editor. Now you can see where you need to make edits in the text. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO Premium 21.8 in our release post!
Enhancements

• Now available: highlighting for results of the SEO, readability, and inclusive language analyses in Elementor.
• Makes the AI Generator tip toaster visible until explicitly closed by the user.

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where exporting the keyphrase scores would result in a fatal error when additional keyphrases were stored in the database in a malformed way.
• Fixes a bug where highlighting would be applied incorrectly when keyphrase occurrences contained different types of apostrophes than ' in the keyphrase distribution assessment.
• Fixes a bug where the schema for a variable price product created with Easy Digital Downloads would be invalid.
• Fixes a bug where the Yoast Table of Contents block would prevent editing a post when using the latest version of Gutenberg (17.3.0).

Other

• Bumps the minimum required version of Yoast SEO to 21.8.

December 12, 2023
Yoast SEO 21.7 is out now. In this release, we bring an improved first-time configuration, making it easier for people to get started. Also, we fixed several bugs and added some enhancements. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO 21.7 in our release post!
Enhancements

• Removes a superfluous warning in the first time configuration when the site environment is non-production.

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where an additional Organization, Person schema piece would be wrongly generated for author pages when a website representing an organization was set to represent a person different from the author.
• Fixes a bug where the initial state for the website name would be empty when saving the site representation step in the first time configuration.
• Fixes a bug where modifications to the analysis data would not be included in the Insights analysis.
• Fixes a bug where the "view" button for tracking SEO performance would have the wrong size when editing a post in Elementor and Classic editor.

Other

• Adds checks to ensure that the plugin has no known incompatibilities with PHP 8.3.
• Improves the discoverability of the security policy.
• Improves the instructions in the first-time configuration so that they're easier to follow.
• Improves the new installation screen layout and design.
• Provides a filter to add a list of shortcodes so they can be parsed and then included in our content analysis in Classic editor.

Yoast SEO Premium v21.6
November 28, 2023
Yoast SEO Premium 21.6 got a power-up with advanced AI technology -- now also for WooCommerce products! Create enticing titles and meta descriptions faster than ever. Own the search results with finely tuned, AI-crafted content that speaks directly to your audience. Upgrade to Premium and experience the future of SEO, where your content works smarter for you. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO Premium 21.5 in our release post!
Enhancements

• Get ready to supercharge your content! AI-powered meta description and title generation is now seamlessly enabled for all users as the default setting.
• Introducing a new feature: AI SEO title and meta description generation for WooCommerce products! To unlock this SEO magic, make sure you have both Yoast SEO Premium and Yoast WooCommerce SEO installed.

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where the focus style of the Use AI error message buttons would be cut off.
• Fixes a bug where the related links block would not be translated.

Other

• Bumps the minimum required version of Yoast SEO to 21.6.

Yoast SEO Premium 21.5
October 31, 2023
In Yoast SEO Premium 21.5, we've enhanced our crawl optimization settings. You now have the option to block web crawlers used to train various AI, like OpenAI's GPTBot, Common Crawl's CCBot, and Google-Extended, from accessing your content. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO Premium 21.5 in our release post!
Enhancements

• Adds a filter to disable the Table of Content block to prevent auto generation of html anchors for headings.
• Adds optional blocking of the Google-Extended, ChatGPT and CCBot user-agents.
• Improves the word compexity assessment for English by expanding the list of frequently used words.

Other

• Bumps the minimum required version of Yoast SEO to 21.5.
• Sets the WordPress tested up to version to 6.4.

Yoast SEO v21.4 - October 17, 2023
We've just released Yoast SEO 21.4. In this release, we've focused on general enhancements and fixes to improve how your WordPress SEO plugin functions. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO 21.4 in our release post!
Enhancements

• Introduces more robust HTML processing and highlighting for the keyphrase density and single H1 assessments.
• Improves the keyphrase matching in the keyphrase density assessment.
• Improves keyphrase matching in Japanese by being able to match keyphrase occurrences that contain upper case characters.
• Updates the list of HTML elements that should be excluded from the content analysis.
• Improves performance in getting the primary term. Props to nlemoine.
• Prevent database update requests on page loads when the site representation settings contain conflicting data. Props to jboonstra.

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where highlighting was not applied to keyphrase occurrences that contained different types of apostrophes than '.
• Fixes a bug where PHP notice would happen when the sitemap index is generated on MySQL 8+.
• Fixes a bug where resource cleanup regarding emojis would cause a fatal error when enabling the Remove emoji scripts option in the crawl optimization settings. Props to MishaBelikov.
• Fixes a bug where sentences would not be highlighted when square brackets were present in the same sentence.
• Fixes a bug where the first-time configuration' site representation logo button would not be translated. Props to fxbenard.
• Fixes a bug where the single title assessment would be triggered when adding a H1 without text.

Yoast SEO 21.3 - October 3, 2023
Yoast SEO 21.3 is out! In this release, we've focused on improving the plugin's performance, especially regarding handling huge posts on complex websites. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO 21.3 in our release post!
Enhancements
Enhances post-saving performance in certain conditions for a smoother and more efficient user experience.
Bugfixes
Fixes a bug where the notifications counter of the admin bar menu would not show with the correct style on the frontend.
Fixes a bug where the slug in the search appearance editor would not be set when published posts were edited in the classic editor and the "core/editor" store was available.

Yoast SEO v21.2 - September 19, 2023
Yoast SEO 21.2 is out today! In this release, we've improved the naming of several features and enhanced the sidebar in the block editor, making it easier to use. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO 21.2 in our release post!
Enhancements

• Renames Google preview to Search appearance in the metabox and sidebar.

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where, even if Show author archives without posts in search results is enabled, the archive page would have a noindex in the robots metatag.
• Fixes a bug where notices about incorrect calls to wpdb:repare would be thrown on Yoast SEO Premium activation.
• Fixes a bug where pagination meta tags would be wrong when using Query Loop Block with custom query variables.
• Fixes a bug where the redirect notification would mention "posts" when a tag was deleted or trashed.
• Fixing a bug where adding special characters like " »" as a title separator would break the RSS feed.

Other

• Sets the minimum supported WordPress version to 6.2.

v21.1 - September 5, 2023
Yoast SEO Premium 21.1 is out today. This release brings improvements and enhancements, including ones to our new AI feature. Be sure to try that feature if you still need to! Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO Premium 21.1 in our release post!

Other
Bumps the minimum required version of Yoast SEO to 21.1.
The AI generator functionality is unavailable if the SEO Analysis is turned off. We now show an error immediately alerting users to this after leaving the AI introduction modal.

Yoast SEO 20.12
July 25, 2023
We've just released Yoast SEO 20.12! This release includes fixes and enhancements that strengthen the stability of our plugin and enhance your SEO efforts. Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO 20.12 in our release post!
Enhancements

• Adds utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content, gclid and gtm_debug to the default allowlist for the "Remove unregistered URL parameters" setting.

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where an error would appear in debug.log when saving a draft or updating a post in Elementor.
• Fixes a bug where the controls for the FAQ and how-to blocks would be not shown when running Gutenberg versions >= 15.2.
• Fixes a bug where the duration text of the how-to block would be output in the user language instead of the site language.

Other

• Updates the verification link to the Google Search Console in the Site connections section in Settings.
• Improves the copy in the final step of the first time configuration.
• Updates copy of our free webinar notification.