Yoast SEO 14.9: Polish word forms, Hebrew keyphrase recognition

Yoast SEO 14.9 comes with a new round of improvements, plus two new language-based enhancements: Polish word form support in Premium and Hebrew keyphrase recognition in Free. Polish is the tenth language to get word form support and there’s a lot more coming. Let’s get started, shall we?

Word forms in Yoast SEO Premium: now for Polish

One of the main focal points of Yoast SEO is helping you write awesome content as content one of the main building blocks of SEO. We’ve built our analysis with readability in mind, while also keeping an eye on your SEO. The free version of the plugin works very well, but the Yoast SEO Premium takes it up a notch.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Yoast SEO Premium and word form support might just be one of the unsung heroes. While the free analysis lets you analyze your content based on the term you entered, word form support in Premium makes that a lot more flexible by taking grammatical forms of your focus keyphrase into account.

So, if your focus keyphrase is [cat game], it will recognize [Read about these games for cats] too. Or, if you want to optimize for [play fetch with cat] it will recognize the sentence, [I love playing fetch with my cat] as well. What’s more, Yoast SEO Premium also lets you optimize your text with related keyphrases and synonyms.

Today, we’re adding another language to our roster. After English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian and Russian, we’re now introducing word forms support for Polish! In contrary to the last couple of word form release, this not a beta release. The Polish word forms is fully-featured from the get-go.

In addition, we’re improving our Polish language understanding and better recognize keyphrases by filtering more function words.

Hebrew keyphrase recognition

Starting with Yoast SEO 14.8, we’re working on adding more RTL languages. We started with Arabic, and we’re adding Hebrew today. We can now better recognize and understand sentences for this RTL-language. This helps us better find and recognize keyphrases for the Hebrew language.

To get this to work properly, we’ve improved all keyphrase-based assessments for Hebrew by filtering function words. Yoast SEO can now check whether you’ve used your Hebrew focus keyphrase in all the right places. This helps you optimize your text in a way that makes sense for search engines, without overdoing it for your users. Find out more about how we get Yoast SEO to understand RTL languages.

An update notification for Yoast SEO

WordPress 5.5 comes with an auto-update feature, which is pretty awesome. One of the side effects of this feature is that you don’t for certain when you as a user come into contact with an update for a plugin. To keep you updated about the latest updates, we’ve added a notification for this. We’ve activated this for everyone not just if you have automatic updates enabled. Since not everyone subscribes to our newsletter or follows us on social media, we thought this was a good way to find offer you more detailed information on the version you’ve just upgraded to.

You can find the upgrade notification on the Yoast SEO Dashboard and you’ll also find a link to the latest release post on yoast.com.

Performance improvements

While working on the making the plugin faster, we’ve improved database performance by not performing unnecessary update queries during the update of a post’s public status. In addition, we’ve enhanced performance by preventing regular database queries. This makes it possible for us to do fewer queries on the admin — which in turn leads to a boost in perceived performance.

Other fixes and enhancements

In Yoast SEO 14.9, we fixed a number of pesky bugs, from bugs kept the page number from showing in the breadcrumb for paginated series to language-related bugs in which we’d always regard closing parentheses as sentence endings when followed by an upper-case letter. You can find the full list of fixes in the changelog.

Thanks for using Yoast SEO 14.9

Yoast SEO 14.9 comes with a lot of new changes and improvements. We’ve introduced keyphrase recognition for Hebrew — in free — and word form support for Polish — in Premium. Try it out!