Both WordPress SEO Premium and the free version of WordPress SEO have been updated to version 2.2. This new release brings quite a few changes and some nice new additions. We’ll explain the changes in this post.
Security fixes
This release contains a fix for a potential XSS issue in the admin, specifically the snippet preview. It was caused by issues in our JS, which is why also did another overhaul of our admin JS. The XSS issue required you to be logged in, so the risk level was relatively low.
Community input
This release contains code that was suggested by 5 people outside of the core WordPress SEO development team. We particularly want to highlight and thank Gary Jones as he’s done several great suggestions for this release. We’ve also had great feedback from Gary and several others on how to improve the accessibility of the plugin, all of those changes are incorporated in this release.
No more tracking class
We’ve removed our external tracking. We were doing opt-in tracking of a couple hundred thousand sites, but as WordPress.org is improving how it does its stats, we’d rather focus on other things. This means we’ll no longer give you a popup asking for permission on new installs.
Recognize your redirects
Recently, while Joost was helping on a major domain migration, he couldn’t locate which bit of code was creating a particular redirect. Annoying as this was, he decided it was time to invent a new HTTP header, to be sent right before a redirect header. This header, X-Redirect-By, identifies the piece of software that created the redirect. We’ve implemented it in WordPress SEO immediately and hope it’ll save a few of our users a headache at some time.
Premium: better redirect notices
We improved the notices that urge you to redirect changed / deleted posts and terms if you’re using WordPress SEO Premium. These should help you to keep your site optimized. If you’re not using WordPress SEO Premium yet, you really should consider it. Not only will you get more features and support from our team, you’ll also help fund the further development of the entire plugin.
Integration with other plugins
We love it when plugins integrate nicely with our SEO plugin. Nested Pages is one of those. It’s an intuitive drag and drop interface for pages in the admin. It’s so nice, we dare say it’s what the WordPress interface should look like. When you run WordPress SEO, it highlights the SEO score (through our simple color coded circles) right on the overview.
Joost recently submitted a patch for Nested Pages so it will show blue for noindexed pages, a patch that was promptly accepted. We love open source!
We’ve done some work in this release to make sure that we in turn integrate well with Nested Pages. This means that when you delete a page, the notice you get to redirect the URL will work, which it didn’t before because you weren’t on the normal edit pages screen.
Other bugfixes & changes
A couple of the changes we’ve done:
Redirect to about Quite a few people complained about the redirect to our about page after an update. We’ve heard you and changed how it works. You’ll now get a dismissible notice with a link to the release notes, we’ll no longer redirect you.
Fixed multisite settings import You should now be able to properly import settings on multisite environments.
Facebook Insights authentication Next to moving this to the bottom of the Facebook tab (it’s not that important), we’ve changed how you can authenticate to get access to Facebook insights. This knowledge base article is probably the best explanation. If you were already authenticated you don’t need to change anything.
Under the hood Also in this release, we’ve cleaned up all our JavaScript and, more important: documented all of it and made sure it no longer gives JS Hint warnings. We did more cleanup like this, in our continuous effort to both write better code and improve how we do so.
News SEO
Our News SEO plugin has had a small update too, fixing some sitemap caching issues people were having. If you don’t know our other premium SEO plugins, check them out.
Joost is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Yoast. He has a long history in WordPress and digital marketing. On our blog, he has written a lot about SEO in general, technical SEO and important topics related to SEO.
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32 Responses to WordPress SEO 2.2
Toya • 9 years ago
My WordPress iOS app will not work ever since I updated this plugin. I get an internal server error. This is a pain because I use my iPad and iPhone to post to my blog. I can still check comments but I can’t pull new posts. When I deactivated this plugin it works fine. I really like this plugin but it’s making it impossible to work. Do you have a resolve or how do I roll back to the previous version?
Jeremy Myers • 9 years ago
Nicely done. I sort of miss how easy it was before to get to my .htaccess and robots.txt files, but one extra click is not that big of a deal… Thanks!
André • 9 years ago
Congratulations update the plugin. I use WordPress SEO on all my sites.
Wendy • 9 years ago
Since this update, the og: image, og: description, etc. tags seem to have gone away. If I “view source” and do a search for og: I get nothing. I see it in the snippet preview, and in the meta-description, but it’s not writing the og: tags.
Scott Jordan • 9 years ago
Since updating, when we publish posts, if we update them, it sets a redirect in the yoast plugin and our updated pages produce 404 errors. Please advise.
Sara Williams • 9 years ago
I have the same problem. It doesn’t always happen and I can’t predict when it does.
You can get round it by telling it to undo the redirect, or if you miss the warning, by later deleting the redirect. But it is very annoying.
Apparently this version added the Post List columns, highly unwanted. They clutter the post list view. Can I remove them? It was possible to hide them in previous versions by setting them hidden.
Ciantic • 9 years ago
Duh, sorry about this. Saving the settings again hid them again.
Christopher Glaeser • 9 years ago
Is there an estimate when the popup issue will be resolved?
Larry V. • 9 years ago
Since upgrading, the Yoast SEO plugin CONSTANTLY pops up the “take the tour” message box, basically making all authors/editors/admins have to stop to hit “close” upon every screen they enter.
There is no way to stop it. Completely unacceptable for any plugin to force this type of behavior within the wordpress backend interface.
Please address with a fix, or Yoast is gone for good. Have been a supporter for years, but not after this.
Marius • 9 years ago
The butthurt is strong with this one.
Things like this can happen, I’m sure he will quickly have a fix ready.
If I was the author of this plugin I’d rather see you go than stay. “Supporter for years”.
Andrea • 9 years ago
Thank you guys for the update, it’s working great!
Arthur Rosa • 9 years ago
After update i can’t access my WordPress Dashboard because i lost permission to do this.
Whats happening? I am using the Premium Version.
DGraph - Créateur de site Internet • 9 years ago
Nested Pages is a great plugin! Thank you for sharing :D
DJ Sean • 9 years ago
I would also love to point out that hitting the close button doesn’t resolve the “Start the Tour notices” and other pop-ups; can you kindly update on an easy fix for this?
Jean Brunet • 9 years ago
Thank you guys for the update!
Scott Hartley • 9 years ago
Any thoughts on bbPress and BuddyPress support. This has been brought up probably a thousand times by now and gets annoying from your POV. That being said it’s an important part for a lot of websites. The plugin does not have a proper way to set the title and description tags for bbPress or BuddyPress and it causes issues from the indexing POV.
Also you guys should write a tutorial covering the use of plugins such as BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce to show what the optimal settings are (Sitemap wise, no follow, etc) and if you ever get support with bbPress and BuddyPress it would be nice to get a walkthrough on the recommended settings for this as well.
Sebastian • 9 years ago
“Redirect to about – gone.” THANK YOU
It was something I would have complained about soon because after an update when you click on a certain menu item and get forcefully redirected to the release notes was really something that made me think about switching with my network and all client sites.
So thank you for removing that. Mind you I buy premium extensions and this redirect could very soon have caused losing me as a customer. For good. So I appreciate the change.
Donna McMaster • 9 years ago
Another thanks for removing the redirect. Really appreciate your listening to us and taking action. Kudos!
vanghel • 9 years ago
Guys, thank you for the update. Facebook insight work now. Can you tell me how to deactivate “start the tour” message?
^ Post author
Joost de Valk • 9 years ago
Hitting “close” should do the trick :)
Fred Morgan • 9 years ago
I too have this problem starting from Version: 2.2 update yesterday. Still a great plugin
Fred Morgan • 9 years ago
Following all the latest reports I restarted NGINX which fixed it. Cache problem?
Maximillian • 9 years ago
How come the Yoast team aren’t trying to fix this issue ?
My website doesn’t have cache but still the Start The Tour keeps popping up. Anyupdate to fix this please ?
Great Plugin by the way. God bless
Vincent Morel • 9 years ago
Same problem here, on all my wordpress installation and even on my local dev machine…
Ryan Rowell • 9 years ago
Unfortunately I have hit close on every page in my wordpress admin, all to no avail, upon opening another page in the admin it comes back again.
David • 9 years ago
Same issue here. We finally deactivated the the plugin to make the tour popups and notices go away.
Gulshan Kumar • 9 years ago
Congrats! We are very happy with Yoast.
My kind suggestion for upcoming version of Yoast WordPress SEO plugin, I’d like say thanks in advance and I’d like to see features such as for adding Rich Snippet markup. It will be great, if you will add this features. Also, it will be extremely powerful if you will make this plugin better for interlinking between authorative site such as wiki or own old post.
Best Regards,
Gulshan
entwellbeing • 9 years ago
Well done guys – we appreciate your commitment to continuous improvement.
My WordPress iOS app will not work ever since I updated this plugin. I get an internal server error. This is a pain because I use my iPad and iPhone to post to my blog. I can still check comments but I can’t pull new posts. When I deactivated this plugin it works fine. I really like this plugin but it’s making it impossible to work. Do you have a resolve or how do I roll back to the previous version?
Nicely done. I sort of miss how easy it was before to get to my .htaccess and robots.txt files, but one extra click is not that big of a deal… Thanks!
Congratulations update the plugin. I use WordPress SEO on all my sites.
Since this update, the og: image, og: description, etc. tags seem to have gone away. If I “view source” and do a search for og: I get nothing. I see it in the snippet preview, and in the meta-description, but it’s not writing the og: tags.
Since updating, when we publish posts, if we update them, it sets a redirect in the yoast plugin and our updated pages produce 404 errors. Please advise.
I have the same problem. It doesn’t always happen and I can’t predict when it does.
You can get round it by telling it to undo the redirect, or if you miss the warning, by later deleting the redirect. But it is very annoying.
Glad! Thanks for the update…
Plugin fully deployed on the AceWorldTEAM platform – https://aceworldteam.com
Thank you guys for the update!
Thanks for the great update guys!
Apparently this version added the Post List columns, highly unwanted. They clutter the post list view. Can I remove them? It was possible to hide them in previous versions by setting them hidden.
Duh, sorry about this. Saving the settings again hid them again.
Is there an estimate when the popup issue will be resolved?
Since upgrading, the Yoast SEO plugin CONSTANTLY pops up the “take the tour” message box, basically making all authors/editors/admins have to stop to hit “close” upon every screen they enter.
There is no way to stop it. Completely unacceptable for any plugin to force this type of behavior within the wordpress backend interface.
Please address with a fix, or Yoast is gone for good. Have been a supporter for years, but not after this.
The butthurt is strong with this one.
Things like this can happen, I’m sure he will quickly have a fix ready.
If I was the author of this plugin I’d rather see you go than stay. “Supporter for years”.
Thank you guys for the update, it’s working great!
After update i can’t access my WordPress Dashboard because i lost permission to do this.
Whats happening? I am using the Premium Version.
Nested Pages is a great plugin! Thank you for sharing :D
I would also love to point out that hitting the close button doesn’t resolve the “Start the Tour notices” and other pop-ups; can you kindly update on an easy fix for this?
Thank you guys for the update!
Any thoughts on bbPress and BuddyPress support. This has been brought up probably a thousand times by now and gets annoying from your POV. That being said it’s an important part for a lot of websites. The plugin does not have a proper way to set the title and description tags for bbPress or BuddyPress and it causes issues from the indexing POV.
Also you guys should write a tutorial covering the use of plugins such as BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce to show what the optimal settings are (Sitemap wise, no follow, etc) and if you ever get support with bbPress and BuddyPress it would be nice to get a walkthrough on the recommended settings for this as well.
“Redirect to about – gone.” THANK YOU
It was something I would have complained about soon because after an update when you click on a certain menu item and get forcefully redirected to the release notes was really something that made me think about switching with my network and all client sites.
So thank you for removing that. Mind you I buy premium extensions and this redirect could very soon have caused losing me as a customer. For good. So I appreciate the change.
Another thanks for removing the redirect. Really appreciate your listening to us and taking action. Kudos!
Guys, thank you for the update. Facebook insight work now. Can you tell me how to deactivate “start the tour” message?
Hitting “close” should do the trick :)
I too have this problem starting from Version: 2.2 update yesterday. Still a great plugin
Following all the latest reports I restarted NGINX which fixed it. Cache problem?
How come the Yoast team aren’t trying to fix this issue ?
My website doesn’t have cache but still the Start The Tour keeps popping up. Anyupdate to fix this please ?
Great Plugin by the way. God bless
Same problem here, on all my wordpress installation and even on my local dev machine…
Unfortunately I have hit close on every page in my wordpress admin, all to no avail, upon opening another page in the admin it comes back again.
Same issue here. We finally deactivated the the plugin to make the tour popups and notices go away.
Congrats! We are very happy with Yoast.
My kind suggestion for upcoming version of Yoast WordPress SEO plugin, I’d like say thanks in advance and I’d like to see features such as for adding Rich Snippet markup. It will be great, if you will add this features. Also, it will be extremely powerful if you will make this plugin better for interlinking between authorative site such as wiki or own old post.
Best Regards,
Gulshan
Well done guys – we appreciate your commitment to continuous improvement.