Yoast SEO 17.4: Performance, web stories and News SEO

Yoast SEO 17.4 is out today! This release comes with several fixes and enhancements for both Premium as well as free. These enhancements help database performance on larger sites by cleaning and streamlining data. In addition, we’re releasing News SEO 13.0 with a new way to pick news-specific structured data for all your background articles, breaking news, and opinionated pieces.

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Yoast SEO 17.4 free and Premium

Yoast SEO 17.4 is a smaller release focusing mainly on two performance-enhancing improvements. For Yoast SEO, we’ve improved the way we check if your site has been fully processed using our SEO data optimization. This should prevent potential slowdowns in extremely large sites.

For Yoast SEO Premium, we worked on the prominent words feature and did some cleaning up. We’ve cleaned old unused database items related to a previous version of the internal linking suggestion feature. This will reduce the size of your website’s database and make your site a little bit faster.

The other thing we want to highlight is a compatibility fix for web stories. Google’s Pascal Birchler helped fix a bug where Yoast SEO output a duplicate canonical tag for web stories created with the Web Stories plugin. If you haven’t tried out building a web story, please do so! It’s really exciting technology and a new way to publish your content.

News SEO add-on

Besides launching Yoast SEO 17.4, we have a nice update of our News SEO add-on for you. In this case, it comes with a great addition to that essential tool that you can use to tell Google about your site: Schema structured data. With News SEO, you get everything you need to tell Google all about your news site. It’s real easy to use, but very powerful.

For news sites, news-specific structured data is essential. In the past, we automatically added NewsArticle structured data for every article. With News SEO 13.0, you get a much more granular option. You can now choose the news subtypes for your specific piece of content:

• A review article gets ReviewNewsArticle,
• An analysis article gets AnalysisNewsArticle,
• An ask the public article gets AskPublicNewsArticle,
• Background articles getBackgroundNewsArticle,
• Opinions get OpinionNewsArticle,
• Reportage articles getReportageNewsArticle

Of course, you can still automatically add NewsArticle to every article if you want. For this, you have to configure that in the Content Types settings of Yoast SEO.

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That’s Yoast SEO 17.4 for you!

Yoast SEO 17.4 is a small release focussing on several performance improvements. In addition, we’ve improved compatibility with web stories and fixed several other bugs. Also, we’ve launched News SEO 13.0 with a new way of specifying which type of news-related structured data you want to add to an article.