Yoast, the WordPress SEO plugin is the favorite SEO tool used by millions of website users. This plugin seems to be very attractive for Search engine optimization because of its features like user-friendliness, documentation style, and reliability. Recently, Yoast has introduced a brand new version, YOAST 7.0 with many more features and updates.
Let us take a look at the features of this brand new version.
A streamlined user interface
The main attraction of Yoast 7.0 is a simple interface which is easy to understand and convenient to navigate. In this version, the menu has got only fewer items in it.
In the search appearance, you will find titles and Metas which regulate your site’s presence in search engines.
A couple of visual changes in this version are as follows:
- Titles and Metas appear in Search field.
- A United General and Homepage.
- XML sitemap which depends on search indexation.
- The toggle switch in the Advanced features tab is removed or merged.
- Under Search appears Breadcrumbs and RSS Feed
- In Tools appears ext link counter calculator.
- Media menu item is introduced.
- In “General” finds all “features” command ( General > Features).
Simpler Indexing & XML sitemaps
This version has got a more straightforward content indexing method. For example; Instead of XML sitemap settings page, a feature toggle is introduced with a feature tab and a question “Show X in search results?” in the search appearance. This attribute defines the function of that specific setting which seems to be more convenient and comfortable for the user. Similar changes are noticed in the follow/unfollow links too. Apart from these now, Yoast has also got an option to make author’s archive visible or hide from search results.
Redirecting media and attachment URLs
A new menu, “Media” is introduced in the updated version of Yoast. With this setting, the attachment URL will be redirected to the URL that has original media or image. Whenever a video or image is uploaded to WordPress, it will be automatically added to the library, and an attachment URL is created for this media item by WordPress. This feature is included in new installations by default.
Deleted Features
During the cleanup process, many functions, and codes were removed. Though it was a complete cleanup process, Yoast has given enough time for every integrated plugin to adapt new features and updates. Though the brand new plugin is smaller in size, the speed and performance are increased to a great extent.
The features that got removed are;
- The function of automatically removing stop words from slug as it is noticed that this feature often creates slugs with a different meaning of what the post meant.
- Since canonical was introduced, clean permalinks feature is deleted because Yoast SEO adds rel = canonical everywhere which manages to figure out issues and resolve it.
- The replytocom variable which allows replying comments without the activation of java-script is now turned off. Nevertheless, every comment gets its link which ends up in the search engines. Hence these variables were removed by default.
This brand new release of Yoast SEO 7.0 is a significant milestone in SEO optimization. It is certain that beginners and experts of SEO will love and enjoy this better, simple, easy and faster version of Yoast, alike.
