Yoast SEO 19.8: Schema improvements and enhancements

Today, we’re releasing Yoast SEO 19.8 into the world. In this release, we’re focusing on general improvements and fixing several bugs. One of the main improvements this time concerns our Schema structured data output. Structured data helps search engines to understand your site, so they better get the right things to read!

Schema structured data improvements

In Yoast SEO 19.8, we’re improving two small but impactful issues with structured data. These both concern the output of BreadcrumbList structured data. One of these fixes a bug where poorly coded themes/plugins sometimes result in Yoast SEO outputting empty values in the breadcrumb schema. This, in turn, would lead to warnings in Google’s reporting tools.

Other enhancements and fixes

Of course, that’s not all. There’s a long list of changes in this release. For instance, we’ve added a X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow header to all comment feeds to prevent them from being indexed. This will reduce duplicate content and index bloat. It will improve crawl quotas for sites that do not disable comment feeds.

We’ve removed two notifications from the Yoast SEO dashboard: the one suggesting enabling auto-updates and the one suggesting activating an add-on that is installed but currently inactive. This makes the experience a bit less overwhelming.

For some time, Twitter only uses the large card format, so it’s time for us to deprecate the wpseo_twitter_card_type filter, and we now only output summary_large_image for all twitter:card meta tags.

In Yoast SEO 19.8, we’ve improved our compatibility with Elementor. We’ve fixed a conflict with Elementor’s new Container element feature when Yoast SEO Premium, News SEO, or Video SEO is active, throwing errors.

The keyphrase in title assessment helps remind you to add your focus keyphrase in the title of your article or page. In some cases, this assessment wouldn’t work properly if you had snippet variables activated for the SEO title field. Today’s release fixes this.

You will find the complete list of fixes and enhancements in the changelog for this release.

Update now to Yoast SEO 19.8

Today’s release comes with a long list of bug fixes and enhancements. We’ve focussed on a couple of structured data improvements that make the Schema output of Yoast SEO a bit more robust. Update now to Yoast SEO 19.8!