Yoast SEO 17.6: Fixes, and new XML sitemaps in News SEO

Yoast SEO 17.6 is out today. This new release brings several fixes and enhancements to improve how the plugin works. We’re getting it ready for the upcoming WordPress 5.9 release and we also included a great new feature for the News SEO add-on: a new way of generating XML sitemaps for news sites.

News SEO 13.1: Lightning-fast news XML sitemaps

Our News SEO plugin is getting quite the love these days. In News SEO 13.0, we introduced new, more fine-grained ways for a news publisher to determine which type of article should get which type of structured data. In that release, we added no less than six new news article Schema types. In News SEO 13.1, we’re adding another awesome new feature: blazingly fast XML sitemaps.

For our News SEO plugin, we now use a highly-optimized way of generate and populate the news XML sitemap. This makes the process of generating these news sitemaps incredibly fast and more efficient — especially on typically large and complex news sites. In addition, we also remove images from the news XML sitemap as they serve no purpose here and this further improves performance.

The technology powering this is something we call indexables. If you break it down, the indexables in Yoast SEO are just a database table that contains metadata and URLs for all indexables on a site. Any type of page in WordPress is an indexable object. We use a special abstraction layer to make that metadata queryable and to connect everything so we can make sense of your site architecture. The indexables power a lot of our advanced features, like the internal linking suggestions in Yoast SEO Premium.

Yoast SEO 17.6 brings fixes and enhancements

Yoast SEO 17.6 is a relatively small release aimed at providing several behind-the-scenes improvements. We fixed a couple of bugs in our Schema implementation and we now enable the Article type for any post type supporting authors. We also made sure the content inside of reusable blocks will be analyzed correctly.

With WordPress 5.9 coming up, we made sure that Yoast SEO is ready when that release comes out. For Premium, we did some changes in the Google and Social preview sections:

• We removed the title and description placeholders texts as these are not really helpful and accessible.
• We fixed the scaling of previews on smaller screens. Now, our previews look more like the ones from Facebook and Twitter.

Yoast SEO 17.6: Get it now!

There you have it! Yoast SEO 17.6 is out today, so go get it. In this release, we focused on fixing bugs and enhancing the inner workings. We’ve also added a new way of generating news XML sitemaps to our News SEO plugin. This makes it faster and more scalable for bigger news sites. Go check it out.