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Yoast SEO 3.2

20 April 2016 | 68 Comments | Tags , , | By Davey Smeekens

Today we’ve pushed out Yoast SEO 3.2. This release’s most notable feature is the addition of a help center to every settings page. You’ll remember we released tutorial videos a while back. These videos are now available right where you’d need them: on the tab that each video discusses. Other changes include accessibility improvements and tons of bug fixes. Last but not least, we have Social Previews in Yoast SEO Premium.

Accessibility changes

As you’ll have noticed we hired Andrea Fercia a while back. Andrea has been working hard on improving the accessibility of Yoast SEO. Some of the changes he’s made are visible and useful to everyone. Our new toggles were improved, as well as our inline help, which now looks like this:

Improved inline help functionality

Help center

We released our tutorial videos a few weeks ago. After that, we thought: how can we use these videos most effectively? The answer was rather simple: put the videos on the tab they talk about. The “most WordPress way” would have been to put them in the help tab. Unfortunately, nobody, ever, seems to be able to find that tab, so we’ve made it far more visible:

Screenshot of the new help center, a purple bar in the admin page with a help icon and the text "Help center"

When you click it, it expands and contains the video for that tab:

A screenshot of the help center in its expanded state, with a video explaining the features on the current tab.

Premium: Social previews

In Yoast SEO Premium, we added a cool new social previews feature. Much like the snippet preview it shows you what your post will look like when shared on Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t have premium yet, now might be a good time to get it!

Social Previews in Yoast SEO Premium

Removed functionality

We’ve removed the “hide” features we had, for hiding RSS feeds and a few other things. There simply is no real SEO benefit to these features. On top of that WordPress is adding more and different things to the <head> all the time and deleting them can lead to issues.

Google-

Google+ is dwindling, so we were already discussing its fate in our plugin. The Google+ metadata on posts was conflicting more and more with Facebook. Facebook was picking up Google+ images over Facebook OpenGraph images. These factors combined made us decide to remove the Google+ functionality from the plugin.

Under the hood

We’ve made a ton more changes under the hood this release. XML sitemaps received a lot of care, as well as the content analysis. We added some new features you might want to use in your theme with the yoast_get_primary_term() and yoast_get_primary_term_id() functions.

Community

Eleven contributors outside of Yoast contributed to this release with patches. This brings the total number of contributors to the plugin to 112, a number we’re very proud of!

Go try it, and let us know in the comments what you think!

Coming up next!

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