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Yoast SEO 15.0: Support for Arabic, plus a new table of contents block

Edwin Toonen 29 September 2020 91 , ,

Today, we’re launching Yoast SEO 15.0. This release features some awesome new additions and enhancements. We’ve added full support for Arabic, made a new block for the block editor and made the Yoast SEO block editor sidebar fully-featured. So, high time to take a look at Yoast SEO 15.0!

What to expect in Yoast SEO 15.0?

In Yoast SEO 15.0, we have three main focal points:

Of course, this release also comes with a round of fixes and enhancements. Short on time? Simply check the changelog (free or Premium) for this release to see what’s new.

Readability and word form support for Arabic

In Yoast SEO 14.8, we started our journey in the world of right-to-left-languages with Arabic keyphrase recognition. This is an essential first step in getting to fully understand a language so we can bring support for our advanced language features. In Yoast SEO 15.0, we’re adding readability support for Arabic in free. Also, Premium users get to enjoy full word form support in Arabic starting today.

With the readability analysis, Yoast SEO helps you produce a powerful piece of content. We help you keep your content focused and easy to read. Plus, Yoast SEO gives you feedback on what you can improve to make it even better. All of this is now available for anyone writing in Arabic.

Of course, that’s not all! In Yoast SEO Premium, we have something called word form support. This is an advanced analysis that makes our language tools a lot smarter. For instance, it takes grammatical forms of your focus keyphrase in account. This makes the process of optimizing a text a lot more natural and flexible. After English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Russian and Polish, we’re now introducing word forms support for Arabic!

Interested to see how that works? Check out the video below.

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only $99 / year (ex VAT)

Find out more about the language analyses and the languages Yoast SEO supports at the moment.

Table of contents block in Premium

We’re always looking for ways to make your work easier to find and understand by both users and search engines. Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about how to structure text to make it more readable and attractive. One of the tools that can help you improve the scanability of an article is a table of contents at the top of the page. For longer articles, these are a must-have but even shorter articles can benefit from them.

In Yoast SEO 15.0, we’re adding a simple table of contents block for our Premium users.

An example of a table of contents generated by Yoast SEO 15.0 for our Image SEO article

It is a simple block for the WordPress block editor that automatically renders a table of contents for the current page and it takes into account all headers and hierarchy. The block is very easy to use and you can edit the results of the table of contents block as you see fit. The table of content block automatically updates whenever you make changes to your text.

There’s a second reason for adding this block, namely jump links. The way we built the table of contents block encourages Google to include ‘jump links’ in the search results. You can see these links underneath a search result and these allow you to see the sections of a page from within the SERP, and to click directly to the relevant section. This also ties in neatly with Googles work on linking to specific text fragments straight from the search results.

Jump links, as seen in Google

It works like magic: we simply add an ID attribute to every header and use those to automatically fill the table of contents. Now, Google can use these anchors to show them in search.

Here’s a quick overview of how the block works:

For some time, we’ve been gradually improving the Yoast SEO experience in the block editor. Today, we’re adding a big one: a much improved sidebar with expandable modals. In this new sidebar, you can now find all the post settings, including the advanced settings, the Schema tab and internal linking suggestions (Premium). Finally, everything is in one place! The sidebar is now on par with the good-old meta box.

Simply click on the tabs to expand them. The one with a down arrow expands in the sidebar itself, while a click on the pencil icon will open a new overlay screen.

The new block editor sidebar in Yoast SEO 15.0

For some time, you could find the Google preview in the block editor sidebar. Today, we’re also adding the social previews to the sidebar. Clicking on the Google preview, will open a new screen with additional settings, like the meta description and SEO title. Premium users also get full-featured social previews in these modals. This is one of the cool features of Yoast SEO Premium, and you now get much quicker access to it — and it looks better as well.

The social media previews in Yoast SEO Premium let you improve your post before sharing it

Other fixes and enhancements

As always, we do a lot of behind the scenes work to improve the plugin. In this release, we made some fixes in our Schema implementation, including one where in some instances the value of the Schema type @type could contain null. Thanks to Joseph Paul, we added a wpseo_sitemap_index_links filter to enable adding links to the sitemap index.

We’ve also improved our handling of languages. For one, we’ve expanded our list of English transition words, to make the transition word assessment more accurate. In addition, we can better find keyphrases and prominent words from words in the text that have specific Arabic or Urdu punctuation marks.

Yoast SEO 15.0

That’s it for Yoast SEO 15.0! In this release, we have three major enhancements: Arabic language support, a new and improved block editor sidebar and a new table of contents block. We hope you enjoy this release.

Avatar of Edwin Toonen
Edwin Toonen

Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.

Discussion (91)

  • Hi,

    Just wanted to thanks you for this amazing plugin you people write. Brilliant stuff.

    Our website has now started using Yoast ToC. Very nice. One less thing we need to worry about. Can I suggest(maybe stepping out of my remit) you add a couple of more features to the Yoast ToC.
    – Ability to select which Headings we include in the ToC. It can help us manage the size of ToC
    – Ability to use the same ToC and use it as a widget in sidebar of a post, with the section of the post highlighted.

    Regards

    V

    • Thank you! Also for your suggestions!

      Concerning the size of your ToC manageable, I might be able to help you right away: The TOC block allows you to exclude certain headings (say for example your H3’s) by removing the ID attribute for these headings. You can do this by clicking on a header, clicking on the 3 dots in the top menu above your header, and going to Block settings. This will show your block settings in the sidebar on the right, where you can go to Advanced and remove the HTML anchor you’ll find there. Hope this helps :)

  • Great idea!

  • I don’t really like this Edit snippet’ button you guys removed, the first I noticed it’s absence I was worried I’m thinking that maybe you it’s some bugs that need to be fixed, but later realised it’s from your new update I wish you guys put it back (Edit snippet’ button)

  • Hi, I’m excited about the Table of Contents, but I have two questions:

    1. When I’ve already created an ID for a header, will the TOC override that ID? Or create a second one? Or will it be smart enough to use the one I’ve already created? (I use IDs with a different Scroll to Page ID plugin for jump links within articles, so I wouldn’t want those to be messed with by adding a TOC block.)
    And 2. If I create a TOC now, as premium subscriber, and eventually don’t renew the premium, will my TOC blocks disappear or remain functional?

    Thanks for the update!
    Ketti

  • Loved the features

  • Hi,

    Is there a way to have the internal linking suggestions still show at the bottom of the meta box? Before they were front and center, very useful. Now they’re in a different window and not as readily accessible.

    Otherwise, can this be an option for those who preferred the way it was? Updates are meant to hopefully save clicks and improve efficiency. This unfortunately did the opposite. Thanks.

  • I was very excited about this feature because I publish very long posts. So I tried to use this in a post that I created in Classic Editor. I don’t use Block Editor because (like millions of other people), I HATE it. It has taken what was a simple job and made it difficult. Isn’t that the opposite of an update? Anyway, the table of contents does not work at all. It is blank. I suspect that is because the ridiculous Block Editor thinks that my ginormous post is actually just one paragraph. Is there any workaround for this? Or will I be forced to use the odious Block Editor?

  • I just wish to say thanks for the Yoast SEO plugin

  • Table of Content is great feature, but there have problem with page break. I can’t jump to section in page 2.

  • About your cool new TOC block, I’m concerned about adding it to pages where I have 20 or more sections — that would create a 20-plus line TOC to scroll through or much longer. For people who don’t want a big TOC and intend to read the post from beginning to end, is there a way to toggle the TOC so that it essentially disappears when the page loads — but can be clicked on to reveal the TOC to a reader if desired? And still provide all the same SEO benefits when it’s “hidden” when the page first loads? I was looking at a different plugin that does this, and I really like that feature, but I would prefer to use Yoast. Thoughts?

  • The red dot for notifications annoys me! After 5 years I certainly don’t need a red dot to click after.

    In Gutenberg Seo Yoast does not mark sentences anymore with a connective word in it. Seo Yoast use to ran fine with Classic Editor, but now the plugin is just causing stress.

  • Turkish support please :)

  • Error after update.

    PHP message: Error Unknown column ‘indexable_id’ in ‘field list’ … during execution query INSERT INTO `website_yoast_seo_links`
    (`url`, `type`, `indexable_id`, `post_id`) VALUES …

  • Finally,

    thank you so much for adding “Table of Content”.
    I was trying so many plugins already, but your add-on is just right.

    Vielen Dank!

  • Really nice article, great features. Looking forward to testing them.

  • I recently purchased your PREMIUM SEO package, but keep getting adds for me to upgrade to it. I’m wondering if I now have it or not…since I paid for it already. It shows on my credit card that I paid for it. Also, now that I have purchased the product, will someone be doing something with the SEO PREMIUM package to enhance my website, or is this something I will have to do with the product? If it’s something I have to do, I would like a refund so I can pay someone else to help with improving my site on search engines. Thank you for any help. Warren

  • Bonjour,

    un trèsbon article, mais je

  • A great article like always, you guys at Yoast are the best! I did have a question on the schema support. I use SEMrush to crawl my website and I believe they just added the ability to detect schema errors. The biggest error and I believe the only “error” that pops up is the image attribute. Is there a way in Yoast premium to deter this error? I do not think it is a big deal for most of our websites though.

  • Very informative article. Thanks for the share

  • Just added the ToC block to my yet unpublished post. Works like a charm. For future modification would suggest allowing the heading to be centred. Also, allowing links colour to be changed. Am not the brightest spark on the block. Just dreaming, but having a return back to the ToC from the links would be fabulous.

  • Looks like some really nice features, well done Yoast.
    It took me a while to take the plunge and switch to the Gutenburg editor, but having done so I haven’t looked back.
    Looking forward to taking advantage of these new options.

  • Hi there,
    Is there a way to use the new content block in a builder theme like Divi?

  • Just excellent. Recent improvements have been exciting to use, and they’ve gotten results. Thanks.

  • Hello, the TOC block is great!
    I miss only the option to exclude certain headings from the TOC.
    Like show only H2 and H3, but exclude H4, H5 and H6.
    Sometimes I have many H4, H5 in very long articles, what makes the TOC with the Yoast block very long.

  • Can you stop with your annoying notifications?

  • nice feature, today i found RELATED LINKS block, i never knew such existed

  • A comment that is perhaps slightly off topic (or not). You have been putting a lot of focus on building functionality for the block editor. Many of us, enthusiastic users of Yoast, don’t use the block editor. Some use classic, and more and more are using page builders like Elementor.

    So, in a way I think it is a bit unfortunate that you put so much effort into the block editor. A lot of people with be missing out on those great new functionalities that you develop (me included).

  • Hello, could you add this table of content block to the Classic Editor? I hate the Gutenberg Editor

  • Looks all very good, but is there a way to prevent the table of contents to pop up?
    We’re using Elementor, and I can’t find where to stop the table of contents to show on pages where there is no use for it (podcast archive, for instance). And where it definitely interferes with the design.

    Thanks!

  • This is awesome indeed. But having to manually add this block to hundreds or even thousands of posts is a major deal-breaker :( It would be really awesome if you could make it work with all existing posts as well – create an option with some basic settings to make the block appear standard for all posts or pages.

  • Is there a way to automatically enable TOC for all posts? I can get rid of a plugin that I use only for TOC :-)