In Yoast SEO 20.2, we’ve improved our innovative indexables technology. We’ve developed a faster and more reliable way of indexing your site’s data. In turn, we make better use of this data to improve your site’s SEO. Plus, this technology helps us do our best to make the web greener and lays the groundwork for exciting future possibilities.
An improved indexing system
You might be wondering, “What exactly are indexables?” Well, think of them as a way to help search engines find and understand the content on your website. An indexable is any resource a search engine can index via a URL.When a search engine “indexes” your website, it creates a map of all the pages it knows about. The indexables framework allows Yoast SEO to make a similar map of your site, interact with it and manage important SEO-related information.
But what makes indexables so special? Essentially, they allow Yoast SEO to better handle different types of content on your website beyond just traditional pages. This includes things like categories, archives, media files and far beyond that. This can greatly help larger sites with many different content types. Plus, it helps us build features on top of it!
And the best part? The indexables technology means better performance and more efficient use of resources. It’s a step towards making the web a little bit greener, as it reduces the amount of processing power needed to manage SEO metadata.
So, how does this work?
When you create a website, you like stuff to be easily accessible online. Indexables help Yoast SEO understand your website, so it can help search engines like Google understand your website better. Yoast SEO stores information about your website in a unique database table that we use to uncover and use your data — and speed up your database.To put indexables to work, you need to optimize your website’s SEO data. You can do this when you set up Yoast SEO or at a later date. When you optimize your SEO data, Yoast SEO will store information about your website’s pages in a unique table. This can take some time, especially for large websites, but you only need to do it once. After the initial optimization, Yoast SEO will automatically update the indexables table whenever you change something on your website.
Today, we’re launching improvements to this system for Yoast SEO and WooCommerce SEO.
Features
- Content insights
- No duplicate content
- Keyword optimization
- Focus keyword export
- Preview of your page
- Works in the block editor and classic editor
- Full control over your breadcrumbs
- Tell Google exactly what your page is about
- Readability check
- Technical stuff in the background
- Redirect manager
- No outdated content
- Internal linking suggestions
- Always updated for Google’s algorithm
Changelog
March 14, 2023
- Makes links in the redirect manager clickable, to help with testing.
- Defers redirect management to the plugins_loaded hook to avoid a timing misalignment between the redirect manager and the Wordfence live traffic monitor.
- Enhances the word complexity assessment for English by filtering out more function words.
- Fixes a bug where reactivating Premium would switch usage tracking on regardless of the value set by the user.
- Bumps minimum required version of Yoast SEO to 20.3.
March 2, 2023
- Fixes a security issue in the post editor.
February 28, 2023
- Stops creating indexables for attachments when attachment pages are disabled, thus decreasing the size of the database.
- Improves the indexables creation mechanism by avoiding duplicate unindexed entries when multiple invalid posts and terms are being used.
- Changes replacement variable name from Page number to Page in the Settings page.
- Changes the copy for notices in social profiles for person.
- Improves accessibility for the extra other profiles in the Settings' Site representation when Organization is selected.
- Improves the performance of image schema creation for really large images.
- Improves the Settings' search modal accessibility.
- Removes person's social profiles form from first time configuration.
- Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when building a hierarchy indexable when the parent indexable did not exists.
- Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when the post type posts was excluded and the post overview was visited.
- Fixes a bug where the settings page of a post type would not load when a special character like ט was added as permalink.