Yoast SEO 20.9: Improving the Wincher integration

Time to release Yoast SEO 20.9! In this release, we’ve added a new option for the Wincher integration, plus the regular round of enhancements, improvements, and fixes.

Enhancing the Wincher rank tracking integration

A while ago, Yoast SEO and Wincher joined hands to allow you to track your website’s ranking status in Google straight from the plugin. Wincher is a third-party tool that offers advanced rank tracking, in-depth keyword analysis, and other features that can help improve your website’s visibility in search engines.

The Wincher integration in Yoast SEO provides an easy way to track how your content is performing right from the post editor. You get critical ranking data in one place, which helps you monitor your website’s performance. On Wincher’s website, you’ll get many extra options to go in-depth with your data. You can also find great opportunities for untapped keywords!

In Yoast SEO 20.9, we’ve added a Wincher widget to the dashboard. This shows your top keywords added to Wincher via Yoast SEO. It also doubles as a connection button, so if you haven’t connected to your Wincher account, yet, you can from this widget.

Improvements in Yoast SEO 20.9

In the Crawl optimization settings, you’ll find a new pattern to help you prevent crawling from internal search results. We’ve added the line "/page/*/?s=" to the robots.txt. The asterisk * represents any numeric value, while ?s= is most websites’ typical query parameter to identify internal search URLs.

This addition will help improve websites’ crawlability by ensuring search engines do not index unnecessary pages, such as internal search result pages. This can help consolidate the website’s crawl budget, declutter the search results, and improve the website’s overall SEO performance.

Background indexing

Our latest update introduces scheduled indexing that creates the necessary database structure without requiring you to click on the SEO optimization button in Yoast SEO. With this feature, even websites not optimized previously will slowly receive automatic optimization of their databases. This process will be done gradually in chunks to ensure a smooth experience. Indexing might take some time for larger sites, but the scheduled indexation feature ensures that websites are continually optimized without user intervention.

Update now to Yoast SEO 20.9!

Yoast SEO 20.9 is out today, so download the latest update of your favorite SEO plugin. In this release, we expanded the possibilities of the Wincher integration. In addition, we did some regular bug fixes and made some enhancements to our database system.