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Yoast SEO 3.6

27 September 2016 | 23 Comments | Tags , | By Joost de Valk

At Yoast, we love to make our work available for everyone. We try to develop products that follow accessibility guidelines to take away any technical hurdles people may stumble on. But we can always take an extra step to help the user navigate the front-end. That’s why we’ve added a wizard to Yoast SEO 3.6, one that guides the user through the initial set-up.

Following hot on the heels of the 3.5 release, which focused on fixing bugs, we now release Yoast SEO 3.6. In this release, we’ve worked hard on getting a better experience when opening Yoast SEO for the first time. It can be rather overwhelming and the amount of setting up you have to do is pretty serious.

Making choices

Settings are a necessity. You have to make the right choices to get the most out of Yoast SEO. To help people navigate this, we’ve added a ten-step process that lets users gradually fill in the details of their site. Among other things, you can specify the environment in which your site is running, the type of site, social profiles, post visibility and Knowledge Graph metadata. You can also set up Google Search Console and choose the title settings.

Yoast SEO onboarding

In the end, the user has a working install of Yoast SEO with the most important settings filled in. After running the wizard, the settings will be hidden. You don’t need these anymore, so they don’t have to be in the sidebar menu. You can turn these back on, of course. If you’d like to rerun the wizard you can launch it from the general tab on the settings page. We hope this feature makes it a little less overwhelming to open Yoast SEO for the first time.

Yoast SEO 3.6 Feature tab

Toggle features

The Yoast SEO dashboard has a new Features tab. Here you can enable/disable certain features. If you want, you can turn the advanced settings page on or off. Should you turn these off, they’ll disappear from the nav bar on the left-hand side as well. We’ve even made it possible to enable or disable the admin bar in Yoast SEO.

We’ve had multiple questions about the admin menu bar. Some people want to turn it off. That’s ok, and we’ve added that possibility, but you’ll lose a lot of handy checks. You’ll have no easy way to validate your HTML or CSS, or the mobile friendliness and speed of your site. But that’s all up to you of course. You can always turn the admin bar back on if you need it.

Yoast SEO Admin Bar

Full changelog

As always, we’ve posted the full changelog on WordPress.org. Happy updating!

Joost de Valk

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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23 Responses to Yoast SEO 3.6

  1. James B.
    James B.  • 8 years ago

    Hey, just wanted to take the time to say “thank you” for the plugin. It’s helped us out tremendously by removing some headaches for on-site SEO.

    Thumbs up to Yoast!

  2. Satyender
    Satyender  • 8 years ago

    I am right now setting this on a new site. I am the administrator but I am getting this “Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.” error.
    What happened to the old options?

    • marc
      marc  • 8 years ago

      Had same issue, now sorted. Go to ‘Advanced settings pages’ the option is set to disabled? Enable it and you will have access those hidden pages.

      Admin > SEO > Dashboard > Features

  3. Yatin Bhatia
    Yatin Bhatia  • 8 years ago

    Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page. i am getting this error whenever i am trying to access title and meta, sitemap, social…etc…

    I think you want to loose your customers..

  4. Robert
    Robert  • 8 years ago

    The plugin needs an advanced mode.

    Trying to manually set Titles & Metas, XML Sitemap or other features brings the error:
    “Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.”

    There is obviously some kind of problem now with the plugin, perhaps an update or some kind of explanation of how to access the older settings is needed.

  5. Mary-Ann
    Mary-Ann  • 8 years ago

    If I re-run the installation wizard to specify which environment Yoast is running on, will Yoast remember the different settings when pushing and pulling between staging/production environments? Also, if I set the environment to staging, will the error “Huge SEO Issue: You’re blocking access to robots. You must go to your Reading Settings and uncheck the box for Search Engine Visibility” go away?

    • Ben Vaassen
      Ben Vaassen  • 8 years ago

      Hi Mary-Ann,
      At the moment you can only change this via the configuration wizard. The message won’t disappear if you change your environment while it should. We’ve opened up an issue on GitHub for you here: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/5774. Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

      • Mary-Ann Zykin
        Mary-Ann Zykin  • 8 years ago

        Hey Ben,
        Thanks for the reply, and for submitting the feature request! Looking forward to this potential feature in a future version of Yoast.
        Have a great day!

  6. Sagar Dahal
    Sagar Dahal  • 8 years ago

    I cannot upload images any more. When I click on Add Featured Image, instead of popping up frame, it takes me to this url:

    “http://www.example.com/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=1855&type=image&TB_iframe=1”

    3.1.2 is very old but when I activate this old plugin, everything works normal. Please fix this bug as soon as possible. THANKS!

  7. Lutvi Avandi
    Lutvi Avandi  • 8 years ago

    I cannot access All SEO Setting menu access anymore. What happening? This is so confusing

  8. Naomi
    Naomi  • 8 years ago

    Since your update I cannot open the XML-Site map or any of the SEO settings. It simply comes up with a white screen saying “Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.”

    What am I doing wrong? Is there a new way to set this up? Its difficult to tell as all the guides are for the old versions.

    • Ben Vaassen
      Ben Vaassen  • 8 years ago

      Hi Naomi,
      It sounds like your advanced settings page is disabled. You can enable them if you follow this guide: https://yoast.com/help/where-are-my-advanced-settings/.

    • dedicatedrr
      dedicatedrr  • 8 years ago

      Also having this problem. Just installed the plugin for the first time and can’t seem to do much with it now…

    • Marc Powers
      Marc Powers  • 8 years ago

      I am also having this exact same problem!! What’s the answer?

  9. vineeth mungath
    vineeth mungath  • 8 years ago

    Updated to latest yoast seo plugin. Nice update. looks some more colorful. Yoast SEO is the only one plugin i recommend to all by wordpress lovers and i am using it in more than 50 websites for my clients.
    Yoast SEO helps me the onsite SEO very easier and i am getting SERP boost faster.
    Thank you team Yoast SEO

  10. richard meintjens
    richard meintjens  • 8 years ago

    When enabling yoast 3.6 in wordpress lots of things don’t show up anymore in the backend. Some plugins are not functioning, widgets not showing up, and as soon as we deactivate yoast all is visible again.