We’ve just released a major release of Yoast SEO, bringing it up to version 2.3. This new version of Yoast SEO helps you optimize your site and keep it optimized. It shows errors straight from Google’s Search Console, and points you at posts that need work. But first of all, we’ve changed the name!
WordPress SEO by Yoast === Yoast SEO
Nearly everybody we know already called it “Yoast SEO”. We were stubborn enough not to do that. It used to be just “WordPress SEO”. It became “WordPress SEO by Yoast” somewhat later, now, we’ve finally caved. The plugin will henceforth be known as Yoast SEO. Somewhat in jest, we add “for WordPress” to that. We do that as we’re working on making our SEO plugin available for other platforms.
Google Search Console integration
This release brings a feature that used to be specific to Yoast SEO Premium to Yoast SEO free. Google released a new version of the API for their Webmaster Tools. It also recently renamed it to “Search Console”. This new API meant we had to rebuild things anyway and as we did that we decided to make this feature available to everyone.
The option to create redirects straight from this interface will remain premium. But if you can create redirects in another way, this is a great, free, way to make sure your site stays optimized.
See what it looks like:
Pointing you at posts that need work
This was actually a user submitted feature request. Brandon Hubbard suggested a widget in this GitHub issue, which we thought was a great idea. So now, when you login, you’ll see a widget like this:
Breadcrumbs in the customizer
If you use and like our breadcrumbs, you might like this even more. If your theme declares support for yoast-seo-breadcrumbs, we’ll automatically enable them and even add a panel to the Customizer so you can customize them:
Instructions on how to make this work with your theme(s) can be found here.
There are literally tons more small bugfixes in this release, so we’re certain we can say this is the best Yoast SEO ever. So, go update and tell us what you think!
Joost is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Yoast. He has a long history in WordPress and digital marketing. On our blog, he has written a lot about SEO in general, technical SEO and important topics related to SEO.
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98 Responses to Yoast SEO 2.3
Elena • 9 years ago
I got the premium plugin. Activated. Bud I do not see the “posts that need work” option. Recommendations on where I could find it? {SEO published post score}
Rhonda Albom • 9 years ago
I can’t seem to find the SEO Posts overview. Where should I be looking for it?
Amir Fahimnia • 9 years ago
Just upgraded to the latest version, works perfect. Are you planning to integrate Yoast SEO pages overview into the backend?
Jack Malone • 9 years ago
Upgraded to 2.3.2 earlier this week. Getting WSOD. Have searched web and cannot find a definitive fix. I am using The Retailer theme. Would appreciate any help. I love the plugin. It’s helped me write better content. Thanks!
Consultor SEO CompuMarketing • 9 years ago
Great plugin, Joost! I’ve discovered recently and I can not stop using it! thanks
Angel • 9 years ago
Hi, the new dashboard is great, but there’s one isse: currently everyone (any subscriber) can see it!. You should hide it for subscribers. You can keep it visible for administrators, editors and authors.
Taco Verdonschot • 9 years ago
There currently is an open ticket for this issue, you can follow its progress on GitHub.
Edward • 9 years ago
301 redirects gone ^@%$#^%. thanks for that. just be honest , why lie about it, you do want to drag people in to buying the premium. why would you remove it and put it in the premium if not? very sneaky, but that’s the way the world works today, nothing is free. they drag you into something for free, and when the time is there, suck on this. I should not have updated the plugin. I was thinking about going premium before, but now for sure I will never do. I am going to install a 301 plugin and will continue installing other plugins if you delete other so called free functionalities indefinitely.
bad bad yoast!
Dinsan • 9 years ago
The widget is a huge Plus for me!
Thanks for doing that. The fact that it is a user feedback makes it a lot more exciting!
Kelly • 9 years ago
Hi Guys,
Very happy with your plugin so far!
1) I was just looking for the 301 redirect field and it was gone :(. I use it when my products are out of stock and I set it to ‘draft’. So, I have many redirects but my questions is; where can I edit or remove them? When a product is back in stock again obviously I don’t want it to redirect anymore.
It just seems I cannot change this? Very user unfriendly. Now I’ll have to make new posts(products) which is a lot of work?
2) My sitename is at the beginning of EVERY post/page and I can’t get it to the end.. for SEO the keyword should come first? My settings in Yoast SEO are like they should: %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
Any ideas how I get the sitename from the beginning to the end?
Thanks for your time!
Kindest,
Kelly
ck • 9 years ago
I’m actually sad that the option to not include the post/page in the sitemap is gone, along with the redirect option. I actually used them a lot. Speed is better, I agree, but I definitely used these two options very often.
I’m seeing mixed messages here. Are these options included in the premium version as they were, or not?
I also agree with this hosting conversation. I’ve been super happy since moving everything to properly managed wordpress hosting.
Richi • 9 years ago
I would like remove the new dashboard widget and i am using this code:
Hi, I uploaded your plugin yesterday but I was not able anymore to add new posts! When I clicked “add new” it just showed a blank page.
John Wood • 9 years ago
Nice update guys… really love the post overview feature! but agree Rich Snippet integration would be a great next step for the future.
Mb • 9 years ago
Google Search Console integration is a great idea ! I’m going to update it today and I hope it will work for me :)
Laura Janes • 9 years ago
Having site wide NO ODP and NO YDR seems to stop Google being able to see my blog posts. I’m testing it using ‘Fetch as google’ in Google Webmaster tool and when I take off NO ODP and NO YDR it can crawl the blog post but can’t when it is. Is that right – I’m worried Google won’t pick up my blog posts.
MaryAnn Johanson • 9 years ago
Just upgraded, but Search Console isn’t working. Authentication appears to function properly, but then the Desktop, Smartphone, and Feature Phone tabs tell me:
Fatal error: Access level to WPSEO_GSC_Table::get_bulk_actions() must be public (as in class WP_List_Table) in …plugins/wordpress-seo/admin/google_search_console/class-gsc-table.php on line 385
Any idea what the problem is?
Andy Meerwaldt • 9 years ago
Are you using WordPress version 3.9 or lower? If so please upgrade your installation a newer version, this might solve this issue.
Webbing Barcelona • 9 years ago
Just trying this new update and having a look around… interesting this Google Search Console integration. Thanks for giving us a better versions :)
Aniruddh • 9 years ago
Hi,
Does this new update brings support for Thesis 2 framework?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Nope, probably not, as Thesis doesn’t work with normal WP hooks AFAIK.
hút b? ph?t • 9 years ago
Seo plugin by yoast very good during work, you should integrate google rich snippets
Andrew • 9 years ago
Love the new update with breadcrumb customization!
However, I noticed an issue with my site after updating the plugin. For my paginated content, all of my pages had the canonical tag point to the base URL instead of a self-canonical (second page of blog would canonicalize to /blog/ instead of /blog/2) and the rel=next/prev tags were missing from my head section. This wasn’t an issue with the previous version.
Any insight on this would be helpful, thanks!
???? ?????? • 9 years ago
Are there problems with the Arabic sites ?!
Mónica • 9 years ago
Shame on removing redirections and sitemap inclusion from advance tab…
Carly • 9 years ago
I feel a bit crazy saying this, but I’ve never looked forward to plugin updates before Yoast SEO. Every time I see you’ve updated the plugin, I get a little excited to check out what’s new. You’re always adding handy stuff. You guys really go above and beyond with adding value.
That said, if I was reallllly cheeky, I’d love to request that the new dashboard overview widget could show more than posts. I use a lot of CPTs and would be happy if the widget showed those too. I don’t think it currently does…? It’d be super handy.
Carly.
Lara Littlefield • 9 years ago
I was really happy to see this update in my queue for plugins. It’s been so awesome being able to witness Yoast SEO develop itself both as a plugin and a WordPress business. I know you’ll have our business and many others’ for years to come!
Joe • 9 years ago
Do you have a list of themes that support your breadcrumbs?
Ryan Jacob • 9 years ago
Really loved the new SEO post overview widget. Improved the SEO of posts with SEO status “OK” and “Poor”. Thanks Brandon for suggesting such a great idea.
Also thanks for adding Google Search Console in WP Dashboard directly.
Regards,
Ryan
Harry • 9 years ago
I would advise moving away from hostgator they caused me endless problems. Loving the new updates guys! keep up the good work.
friend • 9 years ago
After the update 18 hours ago, seo is isn’t working, it is not seen on admin page, when I tried to reinstall it is displaying plugin already exists
Lisa Johnson • 9 years ago
Updated yesterday and it crashed my whole site. Kept getting something like “Fatal error: Call to a member function get_queried_object() on a non-object in..”. Love this plugin, but can’t afford to have this happen – spent all day trying to fix the problem instead of doing things I should have been doing. Maybe it was something I did wrong, but I am reading now that others had this problem. Maybe it was an interaction with another plugin? Is there an easy fix if something like this happens again?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Yes, it was indeed a plugin conflict, although we haven’t identified the offending plugin, but I’m fairly certain 2.3.1 fixes this.
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
We’ve just pushed out a release that should prevent some of the upgrade issues people have been having.
Dan • 9 years ago
Seems to be a bug preventing users from updating their passwords.
Omar Reiss • 9 years ago
We’ve just released a patch (2.3.2) that fixes this problem.
Surendar • 9 years ago
Just installed the update and looks really great.
Fully integreated with google’s new search console and Yoast SEO posts overview nice features!!!!
Kaarthick • 9 years ago
Yoast -> Simple and elegant
Just upgraded to the latest version, works perfect. I liked the Posts overview feature
Thanks for the update.
catseo • 9 years ago
Hi,
my website just crashed after plugin update, I cannot even access to admin. I have white screen only.
I deleted the plugin but it did not solve the problem.
Which folder or file should I change back too?
Thanks
catseo • 9 years ago
I just renamed another plugin “SHORT PIXEL IMAGE OPTIMIZER” which I have updated in the same time.
My website is working, but I have lost SEO settings.
so it is definitely plugin conflict.
Chris Lema • 9 years ago
Way to go! So now you have Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Pro. I like the way that sounds. But you know what would sound even better? Yoast SEO Enterprise. :)
Jos • 9 years ago
just updated and THE hated “congratulations box” is still shownieuws up over my dashboard menu and for THE World of it I cannot close THE box.
Support gave me an answer that requires me to go directly into THE files of THE plugin. I find that unacceptable. I did pay for THE premium version and I still have this annoying box that serves no purpose at all.
Please Yoast can you remove this nuisance??
Jos
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Jos,
why can’t you close it? Do you have JS errors? Did you visit the page itself and that doesn’t make it go away either?
We’ve listened to the feedback on our aggressive redirect and fixed it, I think you’ll appreciate that we’re trying to do what we can here.
Firuzama Hia • 9 years ago
This is a really great and useful features, I have updated my plugin.
Kristy Bernales • 9 years ago
Thanks for updating. It’s a life of wordpress sites. I couldn’t imagine my site ranking on google without it.
smartbee • 9 years ago
Just loved your update, and I appreciated the new name as well.
Thanks a lot for your job guys, it’s really superb!
Wayne • 9 years ago
Just to be clear, since I’m a little confused & disappointed, are you saying there is no way to add a 301 to a post anymore, in the free version of Yoast SEO? What is your recommendation for adding 301 redirects to posts in the future?
Ov3rfly • 9 years ago
I can recommend “Simple 301 Redirects” plugin (without wildcards).
Wayne • 9 years ago
Thanks, will take a look at that.
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
No there’s no way to do that anymore in Yoast SEO Free. You can either buy Yoast SEO Premium or find another plugin to create redirects.
Wayne • 9 years ago
Thanks for the clarification. I couldn’t find a way of viewing a list of 301 redirected posts using the free version, so probably best I switch to a more centralised way of managing 301s anyway. I notice that the premium version pulls in all the existing 301s, but does the free version play nice with other 301s plugins such as the one mentioned below, or could there be a potential conflict?
Avishek • 9 years ago
hi i have a error in web master tools that’s under sitemap section
issue – Some URLs in the Sitemap have a high response time.
Description- Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page.
how to rectify that issue please help me out.
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Hey Avishek,
sounds like you need to make sure your site gets faster.
Jeff Safire • 9 years ago
Posts overview is a great feature.
Kudos!
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Hey Jeff,
glad you like it! We thought it was a great idea too :)
Ov3rfly • 9 years ago
Is there a filter to disable the overview in dashboard?
Thanks. Had to use 'normal' instead of 'side', then it worked.
Of course a real on/off filter would be better in terms of server load which appears to be the main reason for feature removal with 2.3+
Michael Maguire • 9 years ago
I just updated the plugin and it broke my website. Fortunately my hosting company restored the plugin’s files specifically to a copy from yesterday morning and the site is now back up. Very unimpressed !
Gina • 9 years ago
I had the same issue. Actually made a ton of changes right before taking the update. I was doing all the SEO for my pages before submitting a sitemap to the search engines (site already public, though) when the update popped in and I took it. Got the white screen, site down, yada yada. If I delete the plug-in files and try to reload do I lose all the SEO work I was doing in the plug-in before I took the update? That sounds like a really stupid question to me and I am guessing the answer is yes (this is the first site I’ve built so I am a newby) but I had to ask. I was literally doing all the SEO/meta work right before this happened so no back up available.
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Question is if you have to put back a backup or whether the update was just incomplete and a reinstall of the SEO plugin through FTP simply doesn’t fix it?
Bruce Gerencser • 9 years ago
Same thing happened to my site. I updated the plugin and it brought my whole site down. Fortunately my service provider, Flywheel, did a backup a short time before the update, so I was able to recover from the crash.
After the update, all I got was a white screen.
Not inclined to try this again until it is determined what it causing this.
Bruce
Jon Manning • 9 years ago
Same here, the plugin broke my site – white screen. Fasthosts, my host, disabled the plugin and I’m back up. The plugin will stay disabled. Do you put your hand in the fire twice?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
I can understand that. Any chance you have the error logs with Flywheel? If so, can you maybe send them to us?
Bruce Gerencser • 9 years ago
I decided to try it again. Since a backup had been done recently, there was no threat of data loss. This time I deactivated the redirection plugin, post series plugin, and duplicate post plugin. I then updated your plugin and it worked. Reactivating these plugins did not cause any conflicts or crash my site.
So…plugin conflict? Not sure which of these three is the one, but I am happy the update was successful.
Bruce
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Ah, very happy to hear that!
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Hey Michael,
sorry to hear that! To be honest, we haven’t seen many issues other than some people where the upgrade didn’t completely download which broke it. With over 3 million users, if we break a lot of sites on update, we tend to notice, so I *think* you’re reasonably safe to try again. If it does break your site again, we’d love to hear from either you or your hosting company what the cause of that break was, to see if we can do anything about it!
Diane • 9 years ago
Mine is down as well. HostGator keeps turning off my account because of excessive MySQL database calls. With the plugin disabled everything seems to be fine.
Should say problem still exists in the updated version….
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
I’m sorry to say this but HostGator is a bunch of &^&^%. They’ve consistently blamed plugins for the fact that they’re not willing to invest in a proper architecture for their servers. Every smart hosting party out there will tell you that our plugin is about as fast as an SEO plugin can become.
I’d suggest moving away from them, to something like WPEngine, SiteGround, Flywheel, basically almost ANY other hosting party…
Lara Littlefield • 9 years ago
THIS! The number of clients we moved off of Host Gator back when I was still running our WordPress agency was massive.
People new to WordPress: choose your hosting like you would choose a bank! Keep security and infrastructure ability in mind at the forefront. Do not go for the “bargain bin” ever. Unless you want to lose lots of $$ later on.
Ivan • 9 years ago
Mine is down as well. Manage to do it twice!
Ov3rfly • 9 years ago
With 2.3 update:
How can I find/edit existing 301 redirects?
How can I find/edit existing priority settings?
How can an editor role without access to settings edit the sitemap inclusion of a page/post?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Hey,
* existing 301 redirects from the free plugin are where they always were. If you buy Yoast SEO Premium, they’ll be imported into the redirects there for more easy management.
* you can no longer change priority on a per post basis. This was hardly used and made the XML sitemaps way slower, for very little benefit, Google recently even admitted to not using this feature much if at all.
* a user without access to the options can no longer remove a post from the XML sitemap, which is, I think, how it should be. You could write a plugin that allows a normal user to do this, but this feature is gone for performance reasons too (these changes basically save us several queries per post, which on a 1,000 post sitemap adds up to quite a bit).
swanie • 9 years ago
If we update the plugin, will it automatically update any previous ‘include in XML sitemap’ or ‘page priority’ settings we may have had?
Are we to assume now, that if a page is set to ‘index’ that it’s included in the xml sitemap? And vice versa, setting it to ‘noindex’ means it’s not in the xml sitemap?
Is page priority automatically set for us by the plugin or are you saying that page priority has been done away with altogether?
For example, if I have an HTML sitemap/archives page (…/sitemap/) and it’s on the root level of the site with a footer link on every page … I would normally set the page priority to 1 or 2, but still include it in the xml sitemap. Perhaps the same with Terms of Use and Privacy Policy pages. I don’t need those pages ranking high but I want to include them in the xml sitemap. What do you recommend?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
If you upgrade, a script will run that will add every page that was set to not be included in the XML sitemap into the setting for that in the backend. So nothing will change in your site’s output, you just have to remove pages from the sitemap in another spot now.
As for priority: don’t worry about it. Spending that energy on something else will always get you better SEO results :)
Ov3rfly • 9 years ago
How can I find/remove existing 301 redirects in database?
How can I find/remove existing priority settings in database? Where did you get the statistics data for “was hardly used” from?
Is “Posts to exclude” setting compatible to WPML plugin?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
You can find them by searching for the _yoast_wpseo_redirect key in the postmeta table.
We’ll clean up the existing priority settings in the next release so there’s nothing you have to do there if you just want to clean them up.
The “hardly used” is because we see many sites in our site review process and in support, and I’ve only ever encountered a few using it.
Posts to exclude is relatively new and has not been discussed with WPML yet so I’m not sure, but I’ll make sure we mention it to them.
Ov3rfly • 9 years ago
Most of my customers use the WPML plugin. If hardcoded IDs are used, a third party like Yoast might has to add explicit support for WPML, details here.
Please confirm if/when WPML is supported.
Matt Antonino • 9 years ago
Just installed the update and looks really good. Love the name change (finally) and the Search Console starting to be included.
Really LOVE the SEO Posts Overview. Sweet feature!
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Great to hear Matt :)
MBWS Marketing • 9 years ago
Great update once again. Just updated the premium version but it threw out my license code. Should be an easy fix for you guys.
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Hey, not sure what went wrong there but perhaps you could try again? We’ve had a server glitch or two…
MBWS Marketing • 9 years ago
Just updated on another site and the license also went inactive (complete box was cleared).
Martin • 9 years ago
Hello I had this issue too. License was working fine and and now it’s saying “…Premium license is inactive…” Would there be an issue if I have Yoast Seo Premium and Yoast Seo installed but only Premium activated?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Nope those shouldn’t be related. Which version of the premium plugin do you have? Have you updated yet? If that’s not working, might be easiest to retrieve your license here: https://yoast.com/licenses/ and upgrade manually. We have some issues that I’m going to dive deeper into tomorrow but it seems like it’s an edge case somewhere that we missed.
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
That’s… Weird. Especially as I can’t really replicate it (updated about 20 sites myself by now). Was the license active on these sites when you updated?
indirim kodu • 9 years ago
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” said Leonardo, so conragulations for “Yoast SEO” which is an excellent name. (By the way I just upgraded. It works very well.)
Nat • 9 years ago
Now redirects have been removed, what happens on sites that have redirect set up via Yoast SEO previously? I’m a little worried about updating if this will invalidate those (sometime crucial) redirects. It will also be incredibly painful to sift through every post/page on every site we manage to find if there is a redirect, then redirect them using another technique before being able to update the plugin. Also, is this removed just for posts or for posts and pages (the change log suggests just posts which I hope is true!)?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
The ones you already have will remain working :)
But no on the second bit, the feature is gone everywhere.
Sebastian • 9 years ago
Puh, my favorite feature gone.
Now I have to build a script, that exports Yoast-Redirects into my own system, to have one workflow for all posts. Not that funny on an evening, without warning.
That don’t increases my trust level for putting data in yoast plugins ;-(
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
We’ve kept it working, we’ve just prevented you from making new ones. With 4 million users, any change we make is bound to get some resistance, but if this truly is your favorite feature, I urge you to check out the rest of the plugin. It has so many nice features and this is just a tiny tiny one.
We do think redirects are very important though, which is why our premium plugin has an entire feature around it in a much more maintainable way.
Sebastian • 9 years ago
> I urge you to check out the rest of the plugin
You should know, that I sent you some improvements in the beginning of Yoast SEO. So you can believe me, when I say, I have pretty good knowledge of the functions. Even on a code level.
But I don’t like to invest work / time and to put data in a system, that cuts essential features. Today the redirects, tomorrow the titles of whatever.
And the reasons you gave in the wp-support-forum are just senseless.
You say, the redirects cause an additional query on every post-read. Yes! But this is even now the case. You have only killed the edit-function to drag people to the premium plugin.
Fair enough. But I do not have to like such behavior ,-)
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
You do not have to like anything, of course, but you’re wrong in your assumption. The first step is to prevent new stuff from coming in. As you’ll see in the reply we gave in the forums, we also said “not removed yet”. I’m looking at ways to improve this so we don’t have to do that query, just like we removed XML sitemap features from the advanced tab that we didn’t have a Premium equivalent for, because they were not useful enough to warrant the extra queries.
If you think we need to “drag people to the Premium plugin”, you couldn’t be more wrong. If we did, we wouldn’t be bring the entire Google Search Console integration to the free plugin. I object to that notion, sorry.
Ov3rfly • 9 years ago
Same thoughts here.
Can you maybe share a way to identify existing 301 redirects in database?
I think I will do the same for the titles, canonicals and descriptions.
Simplest way -> replacing all “_yoast_” by own prefix.
Karl • 9 years ago
Looks like updating WordPress SEO Premium does not work; clicking ‘update now’ from within the plugin manager does not give any response. Tried on 3 major browsers, without success.
I think it only affects the premium version as the free WordPress SEO is updating as normally!
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Hey Karl,
we had a small bug in that, should work now, fixed as of couple of minutes ago.
I got the premium plugin. Activated. Bud I do not see the “posts that need work” option. Recommendations on where I could find it? {SEO published post score}
I can’t seem to find the SEO Posts overview. Where should I be looking for it?
Just upgraded to the latest version, works perfect. Are you planning to integrate Yoast SEO pages overview into the backend?
Upgraded to 2.3.2 earlier this week. Getting WSOD. Have searched web and cannot find a definitive fix. I am using The Retailer theme. Would appreciate any help. I love the plugin. It’s helped me write better content. Thanks!
Great plugin, Joost! I’ve discovered recently and I can not stop using it! thanks
Hi, the new dashboard is great, but there’s one isse: currently everyone (any subscriber) can see it!. You should hide it for subscribers. You can keep it visible for administrators, editors and authors.
There currently is an open ticket for this issue, you can follow its progress on GitHub.
301 redirects gone ^@%$#^%. thanks for that. just be honest , why lie about it, you do want to drag people in to buying the premium. why would you remove it and put it in the premium if not? very sneaky, but that’s the way the world works today, nothing is free. they drag you into something for free, and when the time is there, suck on this. I should not have updated the plugin. I was thinking about going premium before, but now for sure I will never do. I am going to install a 301 plugin and will continue installing other plugins if you delete other so called free functionalities indefinitely.
bad bad yoast!
The widget is a huge Plus for me!
Thanks for doing that. The fact that it is a user feedback makes it a lot more exciting!
Hi Guys,
Very happy with your plugin so far!
1) I was just looking for the 301 redirect field and it was gone :(. I use it when my products are out of stock and I set it to ‘draft’. So, I have many redirects but my questions is; where can I edit or remove them? When a product is back in stock again obviously I don’t want it to redirect anymore.
It just seems I cannot change this? Very user unfriendly. Now I’ll have to make new posts(products) which is a lot of work?
2) My sitename is at the beginning of EVERY post/page and I can’t get it to the end.. for SEO the keyword should come first? My settings in Yoast SEO are like they should: %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
Any ideas how I get the sitename from the beginning to the end?
Thanks for your time!
Kindest,
Kelly
I’m actually sad that the option to not include the post/page in the sitemap is gone, along with the redirect option. I actually used them a lot. Speed is better, I agree, but I definitely used these two options very often.
I’m seeing mixed messages here. Are these options included in the premium version as they were, or not?
I also agree with this hosting conversation. I’ve been super happy since moving everything to properly managed wordpress hosting.
I would like remove the new dashboard widget and i am using this code:
remove_meta_box( ‘dashboard_quick_press’, ‘dashboard’, ‘side’ );
how i can remove it?
Thanks in advance
Hi, I uploaded your plugin yesterday but I was not able anymore to add new posts! When I clicked “add new” it just showed a blank page.
Nice update guys… really love the post overview feature! but agree Rich Snippet integration would be a great next step for the future.
Google Search Console integration is a great idea ! I’m going to update it today and I hope it will work for me :)
Having site wide NO ODP and NO YDR seems to stop Google being able to see my blog posts. I’m testing it using ‘Fetch as google’ in Google Webmaster tool and when I take off NO ODP and NO YDR it can crawl the blog post but can’t when it is. Is that right – I’m worried Google won’t pick up my blog posts.
Just upgraded, but Search Console isn’t working. Authentication appears to function properly, but then the Desktop, Smartphone, and Feature Phone tabs tell me:
Fatal error: Access level to WPSEO_GSC_Table::get_bulk_actions() must be public (as in class WP_List_Table) in …plugins/wordpress-seo/admin/google_search_console/class-gsc-table.php on line 385
Any idea what the problem is?
Are you using WordPress version 3.9 or lower? If so please upgrade your installation a newer version, this might solve this issue.
Just trying this new update and having a look around… interesting this Google Search Console integration. Thanks for giving us a better versions :)
Hi,
Does this new update brings support for Thesis 2 framework?
Nope, probably not, as Thesis doesn’t work with normal WP hooks AFAIK.
Seo plugin by yoast very good during work, you should integrate google rich snippets
Love the new update with breadcrumb customization!
However, I noticed an issue with my site after updating the plugin. For my paginated content, all of my pages had the canonical tag point to the base URL instead of a self-canonical (second page of blog would canonicalize to /blog/ instead of /blog/2) and the rel=next/prev tags were missing from my head section. This wasn’t an issue with the previous version.
Any insight on this would be helpful, thanks!
Are there problems with the Arabic sites ?!
Shame on removing redirections and sitemap inclusion from advance tab…
I feel a bit crazy saying this, but I’ve never looked forward to plugin updates before Yoast SEO. Every time I see you’ve updated the plugin, I get a little excited to check out what’s new. You’re always adding handy stuff. You guys really go above and beyond with adding value.
That said, if I was reallllly cheeky, I’d love to request that the new dashboard overview widget could show more than posts. I use a lot of CPTs and would be happy if the widget showed those too. I don’t think it currently does…? It’d be super handy.
Carly.
I was really happy to see this update in my queue for plugins. It’s been so awesome being able to witness Yoast SEO develop itself both as a plugin and a WordPress business. I know you’ll have our business and many others’ for years to come!
Do you have a list of themes that support your breadcrumbs?
Really loved the new SEO post overview widget. Improved the SEO of posts with SEO status “OK” and “Poor”. Thanks Brandon for suggesting such a great idea.
Also thanks for adding Google Search Console in WP Dashboard directly.
Regards,
Ryan
I would advise moving away from hostgator they caused me endless problems. Loving the new updates guys! keep up the good work.
After the update 18 hours ago, seo is isn’t working, it is not seen on admin page, when I tried to reinstall it is displaying plugin already exists
Updated yesterday and it crashed my whole site. Kept getting something like “Fatal error: Call to a member function get_queried_object() on a non-object in..”. Love this plugin, but can’t afford to have this happen – spent all day trying to fix the problem instead of doing things I should have been doing. Maybe it was something I did wrong, but I am reading now that others had this problem. Maybe it was an interaction with another plugin? Is there an easy fix if something like this happens again?
Yes, it was indeed a plugin conflict, although we haven’t identified the offending plugin, but I’m fairly certain 2.3.1 fixes this.
We’ve just pushed out a release that should prevent some of the upgrade issues people have been having.
Seems to be a bug preventing users from updating their passwords.
We’ve just released a patch (2.3.2) that fixes this problem.
Just installed the update and looks really great.
Fully integreated with google’s new search console and Yoast SEO posts overview nice features!!!!
Yoast -> Simple and elegant
Just upgraded to the latest version, works perfect. I liked the Posts overview feature
Thanks for the update.
Hi,
my website just crashed after plugin update, I cannot even access to admin. I have white screen only.
I deleted the plugin but it did not solve the problem.
Which folder or file should I change back too?
Thanks
I just renamed another plugin “SHORT PIXEL IMAGE OPTIMIZER” which I have updated in the same time.
My website is working, but I have lost SEO settings.
so it is definitely plugin conflict.
Way to go! So now you have Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Pro. I like the way that sounds. But you know what would sound even better? Yoast SEO Enterprise. :)
just updated and THE hated “congratulations box” is still shownieuws up over my dashboard menu and for THE World of it I cannot close THE box.
Support gave me an answer that requires me to go directly into THE files of THE plugin. I find that unacceptable. I did pay for THE premium version and I still have this annoying box that serves no purpose at all.
Please Yoast can you remove this nuisance??
Jos
Jos,
why can’t you close it? Do you have JS errors? Did you visit the page itself and that doesn’t make it go away either?
We’ve listened to the feedback on our aggressive redirect and fixed it, I think you’ll appreciate that we’re trying to do what we can here.
This is a really great and useful features, I have updated my plugin.
Thanks for updating. It’s a life of wordpress sites. I couldn’t imagine my site ranking on google without it.
Just loved your update, and I appreciated the new name as well.
Thanks a lot for your job guys, it’s really superb!
Just to be clear, since I’m a little confused & disappointed, are you saying there is no way to add a 301 to a post anymore, in the free version of Yoast SEO? What is your recommendation for adding 301 redirects to posts in the future?
I can recommend “Simple 301 Redirects” plugin (without wildcards).
Thanks, will take a look at that.
No there’s no way to do that anymore in Yoast SEO Free. You can either buy Yoast SEO Premium or find another plugin to create redirects.
Thanks for the clarification. I couldn’t find a way of viewing a list of 301 redirected posts using the free version, so probably best I switch to a more centralised way of managing 301s anyway. I notice that the premium version pulls in all the existing 301s, but does the free version play nice with other 301s plugins such as the one mentioned below, or could there be a potential conflict?
hi i have a error in web master tools that’s under sitemap section
issue – Some URLs in the Sitemap have a high response time.
Description- Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page.
how to rectify that issue please help me out.
Hey Avishek,
sounds like you need to make sure your site gets faster.
Posts overview is a great feature.
Kudos!
Hey Jeff,
glad you like it! We thought it was a great idea too :)
Is there a filter to disable the overview in dashboard?
You can use
remove_meta_boxI published a gist with all relevant info: https://gist.github.com/senlin/30c6f1a201a07257ba1c
Thanks. Had to use
'normal'instead of'side', then it worked.Of course a real on/off filter would be better in terms of server load which appears to be the main reason for feature removal with 2.3+
I just updated the plugin and it broke my website. Fortunately my hosting company restored the plugin’s files specifically to a copy from yesterday morning and the site is now back up. Very unimpressed !
I had the same issue. Actually made a ton of changes right before taking the update. I was doing all the SEO for my pages before submitting a sitemap to the search engines (site already public, though) when the update popped in and I took it. Got the white screen, site down, yada yada. If I delete the plug-in files and try to reload do I lose all the SEO work I was doing in the plug-in before I took the update? That sounds like a really stupid question to me and I am guessing the answer is yes (this is the first site I’ve built so I am a newby) but I had to ask. I was literally doing all the SEO/meta work right before this happened so no back up available.
Question is if you have to put back a backup or whether the update was just incomplete and a reinstall of the SEO plugin through FTP simply doesn’t fix it?
Same thing happened to my site. I updated the plugin and it brought my whole site down. Fortunately my service provider, Flywheel, did a backup a short time before the update, so I was able to recover from the crash.
After the update, all I got was a white screen.
Not inclined to try this again until it is determined what it causing this.
Bruce
Same here, the plugin broke my site – white screen. Fasthosts, my host, disabled the plugin and I’m back up. The plugin will stay disabled. Do you put your hand in the fire twice?
I can understand that. Any chance you have the error logs with Flywheel? If so, can you maybe send them to us?
I decided to try it again. Since a backup had been done recently, there was no threat of data loss. This time I deactivated the redirection plugin, post series plugin, and duplicate post plugin. I then updated your plugin and it worked. Reactivating these plugins did not cause any conflicts or crash my site.
So…plugin conflict? Not sure which of these three is the one, but I am happy the update was successful.
Bruce
Ah, very happy to hear that!
Hey Michael,
sorry to hear that! To be honest, we haven’t seen many issues other than some people where the upgrade didn’t completely download which broke it. With over 3 million users, if we break a lot of sites on update, we tend to notice, so I *think* you’re reasonably safe to try again. If it does break your site again, we’d love to hear from either you or your hosting company what the cause of that break was, to see if we can do anything about it!
Mine is down as well. HostGator keeps turning off my account because of excessive MySQL database calls. With the plugin disabled everything seems to be fine.
Should say problem still exists in the updated version….
I’m sorry to say this but HostGator is a bunch of &^&^%. They’ve consistently blamed plugins for the fact that they’re not willing to invest in a proper architecture for their servers. Every smart hosting party out there will tell you that our plugin is about as fast as an SEO plugin can become.
I’d suggest moving away from them, to something like WPEngine, SiteGround, Flywheel, basically almost ANY other hosting party…
THIS! The number of clients we moved off of Host Gator back when I was still running our WordPress agency was massive.
People new to WordPress: choose your hosting like you would choose a bank! Keep security and infrastructure ability in mind at the forefront. Do not go for the “bargain bin” ever. Unless you want to lose lots of $$ later on.
Mine is down as well. Manage to do it twice!
With 2.3 update:
How can I find/edit existing 301 redirects?
How can I find/edit existing priority settings?
How can an editor role without access to settings edit the sitemap inclusion of a page/post?
Hey,
* existing 301 redirects from the free plugin are where they always were. If you buy Yoast SEO Premium, they’ll be imported into the redirects there for more easy management.
* you can no longer change priority on a per post basis. This was hardly used and made the XML sitemaps way slower, for very little benefit, Google recently even admitted to not using this feature much if at all.
* a user without access to the options can no longer remove a post from the XML sitemap, which is, I think, how it should be. You could write a plugin that allows a normal user to do this, but this feature is gone for performance reasons too (these changes basically save us several queries per post, which on a 1,000 post sitemap adds up to quite a bit).
If we update the plugin, will it automatically update any previous ‘include in XML sitemap’ or ‘page priority’ settings we may have had?
Are we to assume now, that if a page is set to ‘index’ that it’s included in the xml sitemap? And vice versa, setting it to ‘noindex’ means it’s not in the xml sitemap?
Is page priority automatically set for us by the plugin or are you saying that page priority has been done away with altogether?
For example, if I have an HTML sitemap/archives page (…/sitemap/) and it’s on the root level of the site with a footer link on every page … I would normally set the page priority to 1 or 2, but still include it in the xml sitemap. Perhaps the same with Terms of Use and Privacy Policy pages. I don’t need those pages ranking high but I want to include them in the xml sitemap. What do you recommend?
If you upgrade, a script will run that will add every page that was set to not be included in the XML sitemap into the setting for that in the backend. So nothing will change in your site’s output, you just have to remove pages from the sitemap in another spot now.
As for priority: don’t worry about it. Spending that energy on something else will always get you better SEO results :)
How can I find/remove existing 301 redirects in database?
How can I find/remove existing priority settings in database? Where did you get the statistics data for “was hardly used” from?
Is “Posts to exclude” setting compatible to WPML plugin?
You can find them by searching for the
_yoast_wpseo_redirectkey in the postmeta table.We’ll clean up the existing priority settings in the next release so there’s nothing you have to do there if you just want to clean them up.
The “hardly used” is because we see many sites in our site review process and in support, and I’ve only ever encountered a few using it.
Posts to exclude is relatively new and has not been discussed with WPML yet so I’m not sure, but I’ll make sure we mention it to them.
Most of my customers use the WPML plugin. If hardcoded IDs are used, a third party like Yoast might has to add explicit support for WPML, details here.
Please confirm if/when WPML is supported.
Just installed the update and looks really good. Love the name change (finally) and the Search Console starting to be included.
Really LOVE the SEO Posts Overview. Sweet feature!
Great to hear Matt :)
Great update once again. Just updated the premium version but it threw out my license code. Should be an easy fix for you guys.
Hey, not sure what went wrong there but perhaps you could try again? We’ve had a server glitch or two…
Just updated on another site and the license also went inactive (complete box was cleared).
Hello I had this issue too. License was working fine and and now it’s saying “…Premium license is inactive…” Would there be an issue if I have Yoast Seo Premium and Yoast Seo installed but only Premium activated?
Nope those shouldn’t be related. Which version of the premium plugin do you have? Have you updated yet? If that’s not working, might be easiest to retrieve your license here: https://yoast.com/licenses/ and upgrade manually. We have some issues that I’m going to dive deeper into tomorrow but it seems like it’s an edge case somewhere that we missed.
That’s… Weird. Especially as I can’t really replicate it (updated about 20 sites myself by now). Was the license active on these sites when you updated?
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” said Leonardo, so conragulations for “Yoast SEO” which is an excellent name. (By the way I just upgraded. It works very well.)
Now redirects have been removed, what happens on sites that have redirect set up via Yoast SEO previously? I’m a little worried about updating if this will invalidate those (sometime crucial) redirects. It will also be incredibly painful to sift through every post/page on every site we manage to find if there is a redirect, then redirect them using another technique before being able to update the plugin. Also, is this removed just for posts or for posts and pages (the change log suggests just posts which I hope is true!)?
The ones you already have will remain working :)
But no on the second bit, the feature is gone everywhere.
Puh, my favorite feature gone.
Now I have to build a script, that exports Yoast-Redirects into my own system, to have one workflow for all posts. Not that funny on an evening, without warning.
That don’t increases my trust level for putting data in yoast plugins ;-(
We’ve kept it working, we’ve just prevented you from making new ones. With 4 million users, any change we make is bound to get some resistance, but if this truly is your favorite feature, I urge you to check out the rest of the plugin. It has so many nice features and this is just a tiny tiny one.
We do think redirects are very important though, which is why our premium plugin has an entire feature around it in a much more maintainable way.
> I urge you to check out the rest of the plugin
You should know, that I sent you some improvements in the beginning of Yoast SEO. So you can believe me, when I say, I have pretty good knowledge of the functions. Even on a code level.
But I don’t like to invest work / time and to put data in a system, that cuts essential features. Today the redirects, tomorrow the titles of whatever.
And the reasons you gave in the wp-support-forum are just senseless.
You say, the redirects cause an additional query on every post-read. Yes! But this is even now the case. You have only killed the edit-function to drag people to the premium plugin.
Fair enough. But I do not have to like such behavior ,-)
You do not have to like anything, of course, but you’re wrong in your assumption. The first step is to prevent new stuff from coming in. As you’ll see in the reply we gave in the forums, we also said “not removed yet”. I’m looking at ways to improve this so we don’t have to do that query, just like we removed XML sitemap features from the advanced tab that we didn’t have a Premium equivalent for, because they were not useful enough to warrant the extra queries.
If you think we need to “drag people to the Premium plugin”, you couldn’t be more wrong. If we did, we wouldn’t be bring the entire Google Search Console integration to the free plugin. I object to that notion, sorry.
Same thoughts here.
Can you maybe share a way to identify existing 301 redirects in database?
Table: postmeta
Field: meta_key > _yoast_wpseo_redirect
I think I will do the same for the titles, canonicals and descriptions.
Simplest way -> replacing all “_yoast_” by own prefix.
Looks like updating WordPress SEO Premium does not work; clicking ‘update now’ from within the plugin manager does not give any response. Tried on 3 major browsers, without success.
I think it only affects the premium version as the free WordPress SEO is updating as normally!
Hey Karl,
we had a small bug in that, should work now, fixed as of couple of minutes ago.
Good idea the name change. Thumb up!