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. But most importantly, we’re releasing a completely revised internal linking tool in Premium, giving you better internal linking suggestions than ever!
Improved internal linking suggestions
SEO isn’t just about writing great copy or superb technical optimization. Structuring and connecting your site’s content properly is equally important. It helps users and search engines understand and navigate your site. But linking all your related content properly can be an overwhelming task. Therefore, Yoast SEO premium offers a myriad of tools to simplify this process for you.
What does this tool do again?
Linking related posts and pages on your site is an essential part of your SEO strategy. But knowing every page and post on your site by heart is quite hard. Don’t fret though: our internal linking suggestion tool helps you out. When you write a post, this tool will automatically give suggestions for related posts to link to. On top of this, you can tag your most important posts as cornerstone content. These posts will be shown above the other suggestions, so you won’t forget to link to them!
Smarter and faster
Our internal linking suggestions tool is now smarter, faster, and provides you with more accurate results. To achieve this, we’ve completely changed the way this tool finds your related posts. In fact, we made the tool more human-like. As our developer Natalia says in this post on how we improved the tool:
“ In the new version of the internal linking tool, we attempted to make the analysis as intuitive as possible. We tried to make the plugin work in a way a human would — provided one with the perfect memory of a computer.”
Simply put, the tool now takes into consideration the context of other posts on your website when determining what a post is about and which other posts it relates to. It also looks at other data than just the copy of a post. For instance, it also takes metadata into account. All in all, this leads to more focused related post suggestions for you to pick from when writing a post.
Check out how we gave you better internal linking suggestions here.
Taxonomies and labeling
Perhaps the most eye-catching change is that we’ve also added taxonomy pages to the internal linking suggestions. If the text on a taxonomy page consists of more than 100 words, this page will be featured in the list of suggestions. As tags and category pages often show all your content on a certain topic, and you might even want them to rank, it makes perfect sense to link to them as well!
Plus, in this new release, you’ll easily recognize what kind of post or page is suggested. Tags, categories, posts, pages and custom post types now carry a label to easily distinguish them from each other:
Curious to how this all works? Take a look at the new internal linking suggestion tool in action!
Interested in how we developed and fine-tuned our internal linking suggestions tool? Read this post by Hans Christiaan on our dev portal.
Internal linking now available for all languages
Before this release, internal linking suggestions would only work for languages in which we offer word forms support. The reason for this was that if Yoast SEO Premium understands the morphology of a language, it can provide you with the best internal linking suggestions. Since we’ve improved the way we find the internal linking suggestions, we can now offer this Premium feature for other languages too! Of course, we’ll keep on working on finetuning internal linking suggestions for these languages as well.
XML sitemaps
In WordPress 5.5, slated for release on August 11th, XML sitemaps will become a feature of WordPress core. Of course, this is a great advancement of our beloved CMS. It’s something we actively pushed for, together with Google, and we believe this is great news for the web!
However, since Yoast SEO already outputs an XML sitemap, we’ll have to prevent that multiple tools create XML sitemaps for your site. In Yoast SEO 14.5 we already laid the groundwork for this. Now, in this release, we’re completely prepared for it. If Yoast SEO’s XML sitemaps are enabled (a default setting of Yoast SEO), we’ll redirect the request to the appropriate Yoast SEO XML sitemap. Doing so, we’ll make sure only your site only outputs the Yoast SEO’s XML sitemap for your site.
Questions about XML sitemaps in Yoast SEO and WordPress? Check out this FAQ.
Web stories
Google’s web stories are an exciting, new way to present content on your website. It’s focused on easily creating appealing and fast visual content. Google is developing a WordPress plugin, now available in beta, so WordPress users can create web stories with ease with the ‘web story’ post type.
What’s super cool is that the Google team actively collaborates with us to make sure this will work together well with our plugin. And with success! Thanks to a great contribution of Pascal Bichler, Developer programs engineer at Google, you can now also add metadata to this post type using Yoast SEO. Thanks a million, Pascal!
Opt-in to tracking in Yoast SEO
We love improving our products in a way that makes sense for our users. We’re always on the lookout for possible enhancements and new features. But to be able to make the right decisions, we’re looking to get more insights from the users of our free Yoast SEO plugin. That’s why we added a usage tracking option in Yoast SEO 14.7 that you can opt-in to. What this means is that we’re tracking basic data about your site, server, plugins, and themes. Of course, your privacy is guaranteed and we never share your data with anyone.
Remember, this is _not_ turned on by default. If you’d like to help us improve Yoast SEO, you can go to the Configuration Wizard to opt-in on this tracking or you can go to your SEO settings and open the feature tab, where you’ll find a switch. In this post, you’ll read all about the usage tracking in Yoast SEO.
Get Yoast SEO 14.7 now
Well, that’s about it! In addition to super smart and fast internal linking suggestions for all languages in Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast SEO is prepared for WordPress 5.5 and allows you to optimize your meta data for web stories too! For all changes and enhancements, make sure to check our changelog. Now enjoy Yoast SEO 14.7!
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