Yoast SEO changelog

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where images via https were not working, props Jannik Zschiesche.
• Fixes a bug where the whip notification can be shown multiple times.

Enhancements​

• Introduces a module that counts links in the content.
• Adds Flesch Reading for Italian.
• Changes 'page title' to 'seo title' in the snippet preview.
• Changes recommended maximum sentence length for Italian from 20 to 25 words, based on more in-depth research.
• Implements the extracted version of the Algolia Search which is now present in yoast-components.
• Adds a banner for the structured data course.

Under the hood​

• Introduces a database table to keep track of the linking structure. If the table cannot be created, a notification will be shown.
• When there are posts or pages to reindex, a notice will be shown.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where there were certain assessments missing when switching to cornerstone content.
• Fixes a bug where the configuration wizard button was visible for users who didn't have enough rights to access the configuration wizard.
• Fixes a bug where the column ID was ambiguous, causing an SQL error.
• Fixes a bug where the category URL in the sitemap was encoded twice.
• Fixes a bug where an old upgrade notice is not removed.

Enhancements​

• Removes the noodp advanced robots meta value as it is no longer used.
• Loads the translations only when the configuration wizard endpoint is called, instead of every time rest_api_init is called.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the tabs in the social and advanced metabox section are gone when keyword analysis has been disabled.

Enhancements​

• Optimizes the way the cornerstone flag is saved.
• Analyzes the content using cornerstone assessors when a post or page is cornerstone content.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the analysis wouldn't work on Internet Explorer.

Enhancements​

• Adds transition words for Italian.
• Adds a new check in the analysis for the presence of at least one internal link.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the _yst_is_cornerstone meta value was not prefixed, causing some themes/plugins to output this meta value.
• Fixes a bug where style and script elements were parsed for the prominent words.
• Fixes a bug where the cursor pointer was in front of the metabox.

Enhancements​

• Improves a language string, props Sören Wrede.
• Improves the configuration wizard with clear information about the configuration.
• Adds the ability to mark posts as cornerstone content.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes an issue in combination with WooCommerce 3.0 where the plugins would load incompatible select2 versions.

• Additions
• Adds a message about the PHP version for WordPress installations that run on PHP 5.2. The warning also has pointers on how to address this situation. We have an article about why we are doing this on yoast.com.

Bugfixes​

• Adds a check for the breadcrumbs-home option to prevent a blank entry being added to the crumbs array, props codemonkeynorth

Enhancements​

• Throws a warning in the admin for the RS Head Cleaner plugin, because the plugin cloaks.
• Improves copy about Yoast SEO Premium benefits.
• Adds link to our knowledge base article about connecting your website to Google Search Console.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where a span tag wasn't closed correctly, props lubobill1990.
• Fixes a bug where there were deprecation warnings shown when an existing author was being updated.
• Fixes a bug where the user received an 'insufficient rights' error when the advanced settings are disabled, but an advanced page is visited.

Enhancements​

• Moves the options to disable keyword and content analysis from the general tab to the features tab.
• Improves styling of tables so they are viewable on mobile.
• Changes the links into shortlinks for the extensions page, helpcenter, facebook settings and premium popup.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes the width of the readability column on post overview, props rikayla.

Enhancements​

• Improves feedback text for subheading too long assessment.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a fatal error "Call to undefined method yoast_i18nset_api_url()". This error occurred with certain other plugins that also include the i18n-module.
• Fixes a bug where some strings wouldn't be translated.
• Makes the Yoast SEO menu top and first item visible in the responsive view.
• Fixes a bug where the yoast icon on the credits page wasn't displayed properly in some views.

Enhancements​

• Improves the styling of the notification center.
• Improves the styling of the title separators.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the sitemaps were being invalidated too often.
• Fixes a bug where the 'meta keywords' meta box section stayed visible when switching to the readability tab.

Enhancements​

• Moves translations from translate.yoast.com to translate.wordpress.org.
• Improves the styling of the featured image warning and sends an audible message for screen readers.
• Makes the left sidebar of the meta box responsive.
• Removes unused heading from the meta box.
• Improves responsiveness for settings pages.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a glitch in the notification center where a notification would be shown twice.
• Fixes a bug where the realtime analysis didn't work on term pages.
• Fixes a bug where the sitemap invalidation uses an expensive query to clean up old validators.

Enhancements​

• Adds a mobile snippet preview.
• Adds a function that allows retrieving an option only when it's been autoloaded.
• Removes review banner from mobile, props abhinavkumar940.
• Adds labels to redirect checkboxes in the search console to improve accessibility.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where shortcodes would be kept in the content that would be analyzed, which would result in incorrect results.
• Fixes a bug where the user language would be used to analyze the content instead of the site language.

Enhancements​

• Updates the banners on the admin pages.
• Improves accessibility by moving the Google Search Console reload button from the header.
• Allow for other plugins and themes to more easily add html namespaces through the new wpseo_html_namespaces filter.
• Prevent conflicts with other plugins/themes which also add html namespaces.

Bugfixes​

• Adds a check to prevent a "Cannot read property 'body' of undefined" error with tinyMCE that occurred with Visual Composer and some themes.
• Fixes a bug that prevented bulk actions to work in the Google Search Console.
• Fixed incorrect timezone for zero offset case (Atlantic/Azores instead of UTC).

Enhancements​

• Makes tooltips on tabs icons accessible.
• Adds check to prevent sitemap from having empty image entries.
• Improves screenreader text for the readability tab.
• Adds a toggle for author and date archives.
• Adds several improvements for readability and consistent styling.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the category picker would become slow with 1000+ categories, props Ron Willemse
• Fixes a bug with VoiceOver on the readability and keyword tabs.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the configuration wizard couldn't go to the next step if PUT requests were disabled on the server.

Enhancements​

• Includes a few design improvements in the analysis section of the metabox. Design is now more consistent.
• Makes sure author archives are disabled when a user confirms his site is single-author.
• The configuration wizard is now called "configuration wizard" consistently throughout the plugin.
• Makes sure the help center is now included on all Yoast SEO pages.
• Added a notification asking users to rate Yoast SEO on WordPress.org.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the metabox was taking up too much space on small screens.
• Fixes a bug where the marking for consecutive sentences beginning with the same word was off by one.
• Fixes a bug where the Google Search Console integration wasn't working well on multisite.
• Fixes a bug where the newsletter signup always did a http request, causing mixed content errors on https sites.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the admin bar would still show advanced settings when the advanced settings were disabled.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where apostrophes would be stripped from the focus keyword.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a stored XSS issue in the Yoast SEO metabox. Thanks Hammad Shamsi for reporting and responsibly disclosing this issue.

• Fixed a bug in the 3.3.3 release that caused the release folder to not have a fix.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the focus keyword is not shown for posts created using WordPress SEO 2.x.
• Fixes a bug where changing the title in the bulk editor could be used to trigger JavaScript for the current user.

Enhancements​

• Removes non-minified files. This makes the download a lot smaller which will result in less cases of an incomplete or failed download.
• Add setting and user option to disable the content analysis; The SEO analysis will still be present.
• Change the overall content analysis bullet to be more lenient in non-English languages. This means it will be easier to get a green bullet for non-English languages.

Bugfixes​

• Fix issue where the settings export zip file could be read from the uploads folder after doing an export.

Enhancements​

• Adds help center to google search console page when not connected to google search console.
• Adds video to the Yoast SEO dashboard to explain it.
• Ships the production version of React instead of the development version.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the primary category wouldn't be in the permalink if get_permalink was called outside the loop.
• Fixes a compatibility issue where we set $ to jQuery.
• Fixes a bug with redirects on a subsite in a multisite installation, props nicholas-eden.
• Fixes a bug where invalid HTML would throw a warning.
• Fixes a bug where reading server variables using filter_input returns an empty result.
• Fixes a bug where the passive voice and transition words would be shown on non-english language

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug in the text analysis when there are more images, the alt tags are not analysed as expected.
• Fixes a fatal when the BCMath component has been disabled in the host environment.
• Fixes a fatal in wp-admin when certain plugins which hide the login are activated.
• Fixes a warning in the sitemap index when no post types are shown and a last modified date is being requested.
• Adds missing capability checks in AJAX request responses.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a regression where the post URL would be numerical when no post title was set.
• Fixes an issue that would cause notifications not to be dismissed even though they should be.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the update notification cannot be dismissed
• Fixes a bug where the notifications can be shown multiple times

• Bugfix:
• Fixes a bug where the text analysis was broken in certain languages in certain cases.

• Bugfix:
• Fixes bug where settings of the Advanced tabs "permalinks" and "rss" were no longer saved.

Enhancements​

• Makes sure the permalink on the frontend also makes use of the primary category if one has been selected.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a compatibility issue with the upcoming WordPress 4.5, where the Yoast SEO metabox and columns were no longer shown on taxonomy and term edit pages.
• Fixes a bug where the default category that was shown in the breadcrumbs was no longer the most deeply nested one.
• Fixes a bug where the file editor could be accessed by non admin users. Thanks Jörn Lund for the patch!
• Fixes a JS error on the post edit page that was caused when the WP slugeditor wasn't present.
• Fixes an issue where our indexability check would fail on installs with WordFence that have the "block fake Google crawlers" setting enabled.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where part of the Yoast SEO metabox was no longer translated.
• Fixes a bug where the post slug would be overwritten with the post ID in case a post was autosaved and did not have a title yet.

Enhancements​

• Removes email notifications for OnPage.org indexability check. It caused more issues than it solved.
• Adds several UX improvements to the snippet editor, making it more clear it is editable.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes the recalculate tool that was broken with the Localized Flesch Reading ease change...

Enhancements​

• Made it possible to opt out from the OnPage.org indexability check.
• Contains a few small performance enhancements in the Content Analysis.
• Only includes Flesch Reading ease test when site language is set to English, since it doesn't really add value in other languages yet.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a lot of issues with dismissible notices. Thanks Craig Pearson for writing the patch!
• Fixes several issues with keyword recognition for keywords which contain punctuation.
• Fixes an issue where keywords containing diacritics were not recognized in alt tags.

• Enhancement: Made the "Analyze entire site" button have better color contrast and resemble JetPack. Thanks WPExplorer for the contribution.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes JS errors in combination with Give plugin, CMB2 Framework, ACF layout builder and any other plugin that replaces the editor with something else. Thanks a lot Daniel Seripap for fixing.
• Fixes JavaScript error on post types without 'editor' capability. Thanks Aaron Hipple for the fix and Zvonko Biškup for testing.
• Fixes a lot of text analysis issues for languages with non-latin scripts, including the "0% keyword density" issues.
• Fixes an issue where html tags were not stripped properly from taxonomy descriptions for custom taxonomies.
• Fixes possible "URI too long" errors when parsing shortcodes in the content before it is analyzed.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the snippet preview was broken.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where users where getting error notifications about how their site was not indexable when in fact no check had been performed yet.
• Fixes a few broken links to help docs about the OnPage.org integration.
• Fixes an edgecase where the indexability check would go wrong for sites that filter the home url.
• Fixes a bug where the admin email that was sent to report the current indexability status was not rendered as HTML.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes the Twitter image metatag that was invalidated after a recent API change by Twitter. Thanks Andy Piper for notifying us.
• Removes all tests directories from the release. Props Edward Beckett for reporting.
• Updated the minimum required version of WordPress to 4.0.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where the focus keyword test in the Yoast SEO metabox was broken as a regression of removing the autocomplete functionality.

• Removes the autocomplete functionality from the focus keyword field in the Yoast SEO metabox because Google is shutting down its autocomplete API as of August 10th.

Bugfixes​

• Fixes a bug where non-admin users were no longer able to update their profile with Yoast SEO active.
• Fixes a bug where all labels in the Yoast SEO admin were bold.