SEO blog

At Yoast, we’re all really busy in the preparation for YoastCon next Wednesday, as you will understand. When us SEO people are really busy focussing on other stuff, Google tends to ‘surprise’ the online community with breaking news, algorithm updates or other developments that really need our attention as well. How is that, you might …

Over the years, our avatars have evolved quite a bit. Paul Madden created the first avatar, back in 2007. A few years later, I asked Erwin to improve upon it and he ran off with them. He created many, many avatars. First of me, later on of the entire, rapidly growing, team. Below is an infographic highlighting …

This was the week of the announced Google mobile update. The update has been dubbed “Mobilegeddon” in the SEO industry, but up until today, it wasn’t exactly living up to expectations. The idea though, is very simple: if your website isn’t deemed mobile friendly, it won’t rank as well in mobile search results (which, in itself, …

As we don’t want to drown these release notes in the bigger security news, we’ve made it into a separate post. WordPress SEO 2.1 (both free and premium have the same version number now) contains a series of bugfixes but also some enhancements I’d like to highlight in this post. These changes come on top of …

Yes, you want to rank first in Google. And yes, you think you have optimized a site for that. But have you ever been playing with Google to see how your site is doing? Probably not, but let’s do that right now. Have you ever used search operators in your Google queries? Search operators are …

We’re proud to announce the availability of WordPress SEO 2.0. This release adds new features for Google’s Knowledge Graph and improves the design, layout & usability of the WordPress SEO plugins admin screens in many ways. Google Knowledge Graph Google recently introduced new features for their knowledge graph, allowing you to highlight yourself in the search …

This morning we released an update to our WordPress SEO plugin (both free and premium) that fixes a security issue. A bit more details follow below, but the short version of this post is simple: update. Now. Although you might find your WordPress install has already updated for you. What did we fix? We fixed a …

During one of our recent projects, we noticed something odd. The website at hand, a shop/blog selling organic products, had over 50% of all page views coming from Google Pinterest. Is this really as odd as we felt it was? When you think about it, social search has been stealing ground from Google search for years, which gave us …

At Yoast, we look at sites from all over the world. Websites from different countries can differ greatly in their choices for color, pictures, navigation and site structure. That made me wonder: are these differences due to cultural preferences? It made me remember a study we executed at Yoast some time ago and it gave …

Today, we’re announcing that we have partnered with Sucuri, in the interest of pro-actively securing our plugins. As our plugins run on more and more sites, we have a responsibility towards our users and the web at large to make sure that we do our utmost to make sure our code doesn’t make them vulnerable.* We’ve …