9.6-RC1

Changes compared to 9.6-beta4:

• No changes

9.5

Release Date: January 22nd, 2019

Enhancements:

• Completes the readabilty analysis for Swedish by adding the transition words, sentence beginnings and passive voice assessments.
• Improves the transition word assessment for German.

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where the Ryte endpoint would be called when the Ryte feature has been disabled.
• Fixes a bug where the 'Show archives for authors without posts in search results?' toggle would be shown when the 'Show author archives in search results?' toggle was disabled in the search appearance settings.
• Fixes a bug where the front page would be shown in the page sitemap. Props to stodorovic.
• Fixes a bug where errors would be thrown in the classic editor when Gutenberg assets were enqueued without Gutenberg being active.
• Fixes a bug where the editor would not be loaded when clicking the ‘edit’ button for a child page in the page overview. Props mondrey.

Deprecated:

• Deprecates the methods WPSEO_Utils::get_user_locale() and WPSEO_Utils::get_language().

Other:

• Adds a Courses Page showing an overview of the available online courses offered by Yoast Academy.

9.6-beta4

Changes compared to 9.6-beta3:

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where a feed of a post would be redirected to the new post URL when the slug had been changed. Props to @stodorovic.

9.6-beta3

Changes compared to 9.6-beta2

Other:

• Contains an updated yoast-components version to make the Courses overview work correctly for course bundles.

9.6-beta2

Changes compared to 9.6-beta1:

Other

• Changes from 9.5-RC3

9.5-RC3

Changes compared to 9.5-RC2:

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where course bundles on the course page would have a button with an empty href.

9.5-RC2

Changes compared to 9.5-RC1:

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where the Courses Overview was not shown correctly in Internet Explorer 11.

9.4

Release Date: January 8th, 2019

Content analysis recalibration (beta):

• Adds a toggle feature for subscribing to the recalibration beta under SEO -> General -> Features.
• When the recalibration feature is enabled:
  • The single title assessment is added. This assessment makes sure that you don't use superfluous H1s in your text.
  • Assessments changes:
    • Keyphrase density: changes scoring schema to account for the length of the keyphrase and changes feedback strings so that we give feedback about the number of occurrences rather than a percentage.
    • Outbound links assessment: changes the scoring schema so that red bullet instead of an orange bullet is shown when you have no outbound links.
    • Image alt attributes: if there are at least 5 images, checks whether the alt tags contain the keyphrase or synoynyms in 30-70% of all images. If there are less than 5 images, 1 image with the keyphrase or synonym in the alt tag is still scored as good.
    • Keyphrase in title: function words preceding the exact match keyphrase are ignored when determining the position of the keyphrase in the title.
    • Keyphrase length: makes the scoring scheme less strict for languages that don't have function word support, so that for these languages keyphrases with 1-6 words are scored as green, 7-9 as orange, and more than 9 as red.
    • Keyphrase in subheading: only takes H2 and H3 level subheadings into account and changes the scoring schema so that 30%-75% of these subheadings need to include the keyphrase or its synonyms. In languages without function word support, a match is only counted if all the words from the keyphrase/synonym appear in the subheading.
    • Text length: on taxonomy pages, the recommended minimum text length is increased from 150 to 250 words.
  • Assessment removals:
    • The assessment checking the length or your URL.
    • The assessment checking whether your URL contains stopwords.

Enhancements:

• Improve accessibility of the analysis results.
• Improve accessibility of the Title Separator setting.
• Adds a new filter for adjacent-rel links: wpseo_adjacent_rel_url.

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where special characters from certain word lists weren't correctly escaped when matched with a regex. This resulted in eggs being incorrectly matched as the transition word e.g., for example.
• Fixes a bug where the search appearance setting for a custom content type named profile would have a broken layout.
• Fixes a bug where pagination elements were not shown in the Genesis theme.

Other:

• Uses method is_simple_page instead of is_singular in method robots. Props to: stodorovic
• Adds method is_woocommerce_active and check is woocommerce activate before registering hooks. Props to stodorovic
• Adds static variables to "cache" results of functions is_shop and wc_get_page_id. Props to stodorovic
• Verifies that variable post is an instance of WP_Post in WPSEO_Admin_Bar_Menu ::get_singular_post(). Props to @yingles.
• Improves strings to be more easily translated. Props to pedro-mendonca
• The browser console now shows more descriptive error messages when something went wrong during analyses in the web worker.
• Avoids irrelevant warning and error in the WPEngine PHP Compatibility plugin.

9.6-beta1

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where an empty feed would be available for non-existing pages. Props to stodorovic.

Enhancements:

• Prevents vendor_prefix/j4mie/idiorm/demo.php from being released.
• Removes all JSON output from 404 pages.
• Improves the Google Search Console table accessibility by removing a duplicate button.

Other:

• Improves the redirect upsell when user clicks on create redirect in the search console overview.
• Props to Kingdutch for helping improve our open source content analysis library.

9.5-RC1

Changes compared to beta2:

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where errors are given on classic editor when Gutenberg assets are enqueued.
• Fixes the WordPress admin menu and footer in the Courses page

Other

• Updates prop name and removes unused content passed to the Dashboard Widget