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Yoast SEO 7.0: Making SEO easier for everyone

Joost de Valk 6 March 2018 210 ,

Two weeks ago, we asked our users to join us in testing Yoast SEO 7.0. Luckily, you all stepped up and we’ve had a lot of help. We’re very grateful for the feedback we’ve got. After fixing some bugs and fine-tuning the release, it is now time to unleash the new and improved Yoast SEO 7.0 onto the world. Here, you can read what’s new.

A streamlined interface

When you first install Yoast SEO 7.0, you’ll find that a lot has changed. Several menu items have been changed, moved or deleted. We wanted to make the interface as easy to understand and navigate as possible. We did everything we could to simplify the configuration and use of the plugin.

The new menu has just a couple items in it, including one that might not ring a bell yet. Titles and Metas has become Search Appearance; a much easier to understand name, because it does what it says on the tin. This is the place where you determine how your site appears in search engines.

So, these are a couple of the visual changes:

  • Titles and Metas is now Search Appearance.
  • General and Homepage have been combined.
  • The XML sitemap settings now depend on the search indexing settings.
  • The toggles in the Advanced features tab have been deprecated, moved or merged.
  • Breadcrumbs and RSS can now be found under Search Appearance.
  • The text link counter calculator is now in Tools.
  • The Media menu item is brand-new.
  • Every feature toggle is now in General > Features.

Indexing & XML sitemaps made easy

In the past, working with XML sitemaps and keeping parts of your site out of the search engines was notoriously hard. When we first launched Yoast SEO — or WordPress SEO as it was called back then — XML sitemaps was one of the first things we wanted to tackle. Now, all these years later, we’ve drastically simplified how you get your content indexed. We’ve removed the XML sitemaps settings page in favor of a feature toggle on the Features tab and a question in the Search Appearance part: “Show X in search results?” This toggle, when set to no triggers both the exclusion of these posts out of XML sitemaps and adds a noindex to those posts. So don’t do this lightly!

show in search results xml sitemaps

We’re no longer referencing “Meta robots” or any of the language that might confuse people. By asking, on the Edit Post page for instance, “Allow search engines to show this Post in search results?” we’re making it instantly clear what that specific setting does. Do you want this, yes or no? Similar changes have been made to the follow/nofollow links setting: “Should search engines follow links on this Post?” — Yes or no?

allow search engines to index post

We made several other improvements to how Yoast SEO handles indexing. For instance, we now have an option to set whether an author’s archive should be visible in the search results. If you choose not to allow this archive in the search results, it’s also excluded from the author sitemap.

Redirecting media and attachment URLs

In Search Appearance, you’ll find a new menu item named Media. Whenever you upload media to WordPress it adds the video or image to the library. In addition, WordPress makes an attachment URL for this piece of media. These are mostly empty pages that serve no real purpose, but sometimes they get picked up by search engines. Previously, we had an option to redirect attachment URLs to their post parent. This didn’t work for attachments that weren’t attached to anything. This new setting redirects all attachment URLs to the URL of the original image or media item. This setting is enabled by default for new installations.

What we removed

During this big cleanup operation, we said goodbye to a lot of old code and deprecated functions. For instance, we deleted all functions, methods and files that we said goodbye to since before version 4.0. We had kept those around to make sure that other plugins that integrate with us had time to adapt. As 4.0 is over a year ago, we thought it was time to move on. By doing this, we made the plugin a lot smaller in size and that lead to a big increase in performance.

We’ve also removed some features that we feel are no longer necessary. Here are the things we removed:

  • The feature that automatically removed stopwords from the slug. This feature was not really that useful anymore and sometimes lead to slugs that had the opposite meaning of what the post title said.
  • The clean permalinks feature, as it was created before canonical was introduced. rel=canonical, which Yoast SEO adds everywhere, deals with the issues it solves and thus this feature is no longer needed.
  • We’ve removed the option to turn off the replytocom variable. The replytocom feature in WordPress lets you reply to comments without activating JavaScript in your browser. However, every comment gets is own link and these could all end up in the search engines. So we now remove these variables by default.

Pssst, did you see the new Yoast SEO logo?

If you’ve read the release post of the Yoast SEO 7.0 beta version, you might have seen the new logo for Yoast SEO. If you haven’t, see it here. We’re no longer using a traffic light as our icon since this is not a universally known metaphor. We do still use those colorful bullets, though.

We’re really proud of Yoast SEO 7.0!

Yoast SEO 7.0 is a major release and we’re very proud of this one. We’d like to thank everyone who helped us build and test it. Together, we did a ton of work and made Yoast SEO a lot better, faster and, most importantly, easier to understand for everyone, expert and beginner alike. Enjoy!

Thanks again for using Yoast SEO!

Read more: Why every website needs Yoast SEO »

Avatar of Joost de Valk
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.

Discussion (210)

  • With the latest verion 7.0.3 I’m not able to open the product list in woocommerce any more. I get a white screen. If I deactivate the plugin I’m able to open the product list again. I get this problem in any woocommerce site I handle. Please fix this issue a.s.a.p….

  • Sorry–this is not clear:

    “We’ve removed the option to turn off the replytocom variable. The replytocom feature in WordPress lets you reply to comments without activating JavaScript in your browser. However, every comment gets is own link and these could all end up in the search engines. So we now remove these variables by default.”

  • Hi, I’ve noticed the the image attachment of a very popular post of mine is now indexed on the first Google page. I don’t want this to happen of course (it’s just an image!) and I have followed the instructions you provide here https://yoast.com/help/redirect-image-attachment-urls/ – I’ve set to YES “redirect attachments URLs to the attachment itself” and made sure all the media in the media library were attached. I’ve waited a week and the attachment is still indexed on Google. Can you help me solve this? Thank you.

  • I really like this 7.0 version, I think it’s great that you take into consideration both beginners and experts since this plugin is really helpful and powerful. I even like small changes like the “yes or no” since it’s just clear and straight to the point. Anyway, congratulations for an amazing tool, I’ve been using it for years and look forward to many more.

  • So if you are new to Yoast, you can no longer find your sitemap URL ( /sitemap_index.xml) if you want to add it to Search console?

  • HI, I have seen Yoast premium in action. That was the versions before 7. There used to a a tab where one could view the sitemaps. One could also copy them and add them to Search Console. Is that feature still available in v7? Ie, where can I view my sitemaps in v7?

  • Where is the feature to limit the number of entries per site map? I’ve had to restore to the previous version of Yoast in order for my Post Site map to work. It doesn’t in the new version.

  • Hello.

    A question related to the RSS section. Before, in the content box that will be placed after each entry in the feed, we could put Html format. For example, I could add a Link Dofollow…. Now… Can’t we add Html anymore?

  • Awesome update!
    However, our breadcrumbs were ‘enabled’ before and were now disabled + all our settings disappeared.

  • Hello
    How to limit posts per sitemap page? i used to have set to 200 because 1000 was breaking the server.

    Since update i cant find the setting!

    thanks

  • Pessimo aggiornamento per quel che riguarda soprattutto la sitemap. Automatizzare non significa migliorare, significa far perdere il controllo di quello che si fa al webmaster. Prendo atto dell’aggiornamento ma effetto il downgrade.

  • hi, am not seeing analysis, slug, meta description in new posts, or even editing old. Only focus keyword tab is available.

  • hi, the update breaks the category slugs. “Remove the categories prefix” its not working anymore. Is there a setting for that or is it a bug?

  • Shit… My canonical structure has been changed after the update. i am not technical. Before that it was working fine. But now the canonical url added /category/ again. I was getting 404 error.

    Finally i found to change the canonical url option in search appearance. The i changed it to remove. After that all of my category pages goes to 404 error.

    Very worst update for me.

  • Can you guys check “Remove the categories prefix” its not working and for those who use it before all the category link will show error 404 all the page without “category” will broke just dont save any settings if you do all the category link will show error 404.

  • Sitemap: /attachment-sitemap.xml has disappeared, sitemap URL is returning a 404. Is this sitemap no longer generated in version 7.0.2? Should I delete this sitemap in Google Search Console where it’s showing an error?

  • If you guys have no work, please invent something great like Yoast SEO plugin. Don’t screw up with what already working great.

    This is sooooo much stupid to come to your website and learn about it. GOD… when people grow their stupidity grow with them…

  • Hi!
    I am trying to enable the metadata on my site. There used to be a setting for this in the advanced setting tab under features. Was this moved to somewhere else? Thanks!

  • Sorry the bullets are gray, not blue ! But I still don’t know what they mean.. thanks :)

  • Hello, yoast 7.0.1 performance Load beautiful is yoast 7.0.2 load bad. how do I get the old back?

  • I can’t help but notice you didn’t mention anything about Gutengberg compatibility. WP SEO is at the top of the list of most installed and also not compatible plugins. I can’t help but feel like you’re all actively ignoring this major event in WP Core development. Can you please let us know if you’re handling Gutenberg?

    Otherwise I’m going to need to migrate a few dozen sites off of WP SEO Premium to some other equivalent plugin, probably AIO SEO or Ultimate+. Thx

  • Hello, Please can you tell me what the blue bullet means next to my posts? I never had those before… Thank you :)

  • I also want to try yoast 7

  • What i think is big changes Must Come with directions so even the beginner can understand because all the tutorial available in the internet about this plugin now there useless as the interface is change even some of the key point like image links and others… So i think you should provide the tutorial for the best features (i mean how to set up this plugin) and how more than that show us to how to use yoast for the best performance and SEO which mean to recommend how to set up yoast for best SEO result.

  • Hi,

    I’ve not updated yet, but a friend pointed that now there’s no way to have the pagination pages no-indexed.

    That is: blog/page2 – blog/page3 etc. that before you could have them no-indexed, right now will be set to “index” always.

    Can you confirm?

    Thanks.

  • Hi I am excited about checking this out. Thanks in advance. I am a beginner for SEO, so can you please point me in the direction of a step by step guide to do it properly please.
    Thanks.

  • Hello…. Every update is good, so congratulations!….

    You have removed the specific section of the Sitemape, but…, before I could exclude certain URLs by the assigned ID. In the new plugin update… ¿Can we not exclude specific pages or post with the ID?… I don’t find that option

    Thanks for the answer.

  • This is just great! Thank you :)

  • Great new update, much more logical

  • Great update. One thing I noticed is that the update caused attachments to be included in the sitemap which is what I always used to exclude. I found this out after logging into GSC and had to go back into all my sites to remove the attachments sitemap. Was this intentional or an oversight? I would expect that an update would always maintain previous settings. Sorry if this had already been raised in the comments.

  • Oh, and when you have huge amount of GA profiles to connect to you don’t see some of them on the list and can’t connect. Last time I pointed out this bug support said they don’t support unpaid users. Hillarious!

  • As always sitemap.xml is not working from clean install. Earlier there was a workaround on the XML page now it’s gone.

  • How about the meta keyword? Do you remove it on the latest version?

  • Hello, There
    Now, where can I find sitemap link of my website in Yoast 7.01 version?

  • Yesterday I updated to Yoast 7.0.1. The Yoast box and update button on the edit category page disappeared. It means I can’t make any changes to the category descriptions now. I thought the bug would be fixed by today and a new update will come. But today I logged in to a backend, and I can only see a broken backend page. So, I deleted the plugin via FTP and reinstalled it. The backend is fixed, but the bug on edit category page is still there. Please fix it asap and be more careful with updates. Many thanks.

  • How do I remove Yoast from a particular page that has IDX data for a real estate site? I’ve tried several coding options from years ago without success:

    add_action(‘template_redirect’,’remove_wpseo’);

    function remove_wpseo(){
    if (is_page(635)) {
    global $wpseo_front;
    if(defined($wpseo_front)){
    remove_action(‘wp_head’,array($wpseo_front,’head’),1);
    }
    else {
    $wp_thing = WPSEO_Frontend::get_instance();
    remove_action(‘wp_head’,array($wp_thing,’head’),1);
    }
    }
    }

    Any help would be appreciated!

    Thanks

  • Hi there,
    all my attachment pages have lost their description with updating to new version 7.0.1. Only images are shown… Took me half a day to find out that it is Yoast update this morning, that makes my content unseen…. Would be nice to see it again…

  • Hi there, good work everyone!

    There is one thing not brought up here, which I guess is a setting, but I can’t find it anywhere. My breadcrumbs lost their subpages path when I upgraded to 7.0. A bit annoying, but I suppose I can set them back. Do you know anything about this?

  • Yoast is the best plugin for a webmaster. Thanks for the notification updates.

  • Hi, pages hierarchy is not longer displayed in breadcrumb on my site.
    I now have “Home » Child page”.
    Parent page is missing, should be “Home » Parent page » Child page”.

  • This is incredibly perfect. Thanks to you for changing the SEO world.

  • Yoast is the best. Thanks for the notification updates. Hope it will be helpful in the future posts.

  • i just upgraded my yoast plugin, it’s really awesome

  • I guess i must be the one to say it. But, when gettting a new major update for Yoast SEO, i always wait a day and tadaa, immediately a bug fix. I have been doing this specifically only for this plugin and so far have not been “dissappointed”.

    Maybe you can extend your testing period?!

  • Hello, the new update is cool and seeing a lot of improvement you guys are doing.
    Thanks.

  • I love Yoast plugin very much, Thank you for the good work :)

  • Thanks for the new versión! This is really awesome.

    Yoast SEO <3

  • I was using no tag base plugin which remove the word “tag” from the link but now the plugin is not working and all of my tags are not found.

    Really Sad

  • You guys may find the new update nice but same why it break everything, check the Category URLs if you set remove the category page redirect a post the category it will not work in remove you have to keep the category thing. In my website i remove those so now its force to show. Another thing Video Sitemap it force to re-index i have more than 1000 post how long do you thing its going to take to re-index . Please check this and update please, Any way good work and thanks for plugin.

  • Hi

    Still confused as to what the correct setting are for Media & attachment URLs? I obviously dont want it to create endless urls for each media file, but i want to be able to display my images in google search. So what are the correct settings for these. I currently have them both set to off.

  • Definitely looking forward to it. I was wondering if you guys are planning to add Schema/Rich Card features? There are very limited plugins for this.

  • What a fantastic update! Yay for progress.
    It’s great that stopwords won’t be removed from slugs anymore. Stopwords are so important to the meaning of many titles!

    I’m looking forward to trying v7.

  • A bit strange now…

    When searching the website source from one of my sites, the title is correct.
    But Google adds an additional sitename…?
    Is there some “voodoo” ? :-D
    Has anybody else this strange issue?

  • The more technology advances, the more it has to be dumbed down. Seriously, if you don’t know what you’re doing, or don’t have the time to figure it out, don’t do it.

  • I’m not getting a notice to update yet. Will it be coming?

  • We updated Yoast but now we get a fatal error.

    Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class ‘ComposerAutoloaderInit104ee497197b3cf4676ee24c0ff0c7f1’ not found in /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/vendor/autoload_52.php:7 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/wp-seo-main.php(54): require() #1 /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/wp-seo.php(47): require_once(‘/var/www/web237…’) #2 /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/wp-settings.php(305): include_once(‘/var/www/web237…’) #3 /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/wp-config.php(98): require_once(‘/var/www/web237…’) #4 /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/wp-load.php(37): require_once(‘/var/www/web237…’) #5 /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/wp-blog-header.php(13): require_once(‘/var/www/web237…’) #6 /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/index.php(17): require(‘/var/www/web237…’) #7 {main} thrown in /var/www/web23764634/html/geschenke/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/vendor/autoload_52.php on line 7

  • Thank you so much now the plugin look so awesome easy to understand and seo optimized.

  • Thanks guys for update. This New update help me a lot.

  • Beautiful. Thank you guys for this amazing topics.

  • I’d just like to see a balance between newbie and SEO professsional, like the new “nofollow, follow” option that could have “nofollow, follow” beside it.

    But, ok, your target is newbies, go get them!

  • I love this plugin
    Thanks Yoast

  • Thank you so much for such a great tool. I like it.

  • How does one get the update?

  • The new improvements look really good. Nice job guys. From what I see, the changes will make our lives a lot easier. Thanks!

  • I use Yoast to populate the metadata description for our website on Facebook. All the pages are displaying the correct Yoast metadata info EXCEPT our homepage which seems to still show the Avada default. So it seems i have the issue despite the fact I disabled the Avada level meta tag. All my other pages when the url is pasted into Facebook look correct, except our homepage.

  • Hey Joost!

    I just updated the plugin on my internet marketing blog and was wondering what happened to the Sitemap feature!

    Now I know! :)

    This new version seems more simple. I’m liking it.

    Thank you guys for everything and all the help with SEO!

    Best regards! :D

  • Great update and a very nice looking new logo. I know had hard it is to find something modern, sharp and fresh looking. Think it works great. Well done!

  • Hi, Please could you confirm that the settings for Website name and Alternative name have been deprecated. I could never find any details about when Google made use of the ‘Alternative name’ tag and only last week posted a support request about it.

  • hello,

    i dont want redirection for the attachment page,
    is there any way to disable it?

    thank you

  • Thanks for the informing us about the new release. Can’t wait to update my existing plugin & try out the new features.

  • Beautiful. Thank you guys for this amazing plugin.

  • Thanks for this beautiful update. I’ll wait for the small incoming update since I don’t want to bother with breadcrumb and category issues… Looking forward to test it… soon ? :)

  • We are using yoast for more than a year, and that helped us to rank on first page for keywords like Tehran Hostel, Hostel Tehran in Google SERP and we are very thankfull for the time and effort you put every day to keep this plug in useful and improve it. Yoast SEO keep getting better and better every day, So Thank you guys.

  • So I just bought the Yoast SEO for WordPress online training course. Since a lot of the menu options and options, in general, have changed, will you be releasing a new version of this course?

  • Please let us know if this is a install over the current version? or does this install as a new version?

    Will it preserve all the current settings?

    How do we make a backup of all current Yoast settings prior to updating?

  • The Plugin ignored my breadcrumb parameters and my settings for “Remove the categories prefix”. Switching back to “Remove the categories prefix” does not work. All my category pages in the Google index result in 404 errors. Trying to rollback with last nights backup. Quite disappointing.

  • Hi Joost,
    Whenever I read articles on Yoast.com, I wonder how can somebody be so detailed and helpful.

    I just updated my Yoast SEO plugin and read this article. You’re right, the settings in the plugin are now clearer than the previous version.

    I have a question though, about the Format-based archives under ‘Taxonomies.’ I have set it to ‘Disabled’.
    Could you please explain what exactly does it do? I tried searching for information on Yoast.com but couldn’t find anything. (I hope I’ve set the correct option.)

    And yes, the new Yoast logo is awesome.
    Congratulations, best wishes, and a BIG thank you for this update!

  • Thanks for the awesome works. I see that the new logo looks more friendly now. I have a question, do all the existing configurations remain unchanged?.

    Thanks!

  • This update is bulshit. I had to restore the backup to return the old version.

  • Beautiful. Thank you guys for this amazing plugin. We are so grateful that we could find such an amazing tool.

  • Yes, Yoast for life!

  • Yoast is my favorite WordPress plugin running on my blog. Thanks for the update Team Yoast :)
    Loved the latest version <3

  • Love your plugin! Congrats on the new release! I Just upgraded to it and all of a sudden the breadcrumbs went missing. Had to go and re-enable them again. I have TONS of websites using your plugin. Is there a way to upgrade without having to go back and re-enable the feature again?

  • Hi guys, just a note about a typo in the replytocom parapgraph, you repeated “you reply” twice.
    Otherwise, great update, congrats! :)

  • The new plugin update beats Squirrly with providing great beginner friendly experience. My clients loved this update. Kudos, Yoast!!

  • Well done guys, for the most performing for a good credibility of website.

  • Hi Sir,
    visually a great work and the hard work does pay off. Keep up the good work.
    Thank you for actually taking suggestions.

  • I just installed Yoast SEO yesterday and updated to 7.0 today. It makes my work so much easier but I guess I still have to optimize the usage of this great plugin.

  • Nice improvements. I can really feel the speed improvements as well. Thanks @yoast

  • “Should search engines follow links on this Post?”
    does this set a default which can be over-ridden in html? or does it over-ride the html?

  • Thank you. Lots of exciting new changes. I first installed Yoast a few months ago and have noticed so much improvement. Plus loving the regular emails with really useful information in them.

  • Great work! Will the plugin update feature automatically remove the older files since it’s smaller in size? Keep up the good work! Thanks

  • Is there a video tutorial about the new updates? I love using Yoast for our SEO projects. Sometimes a video is easier to view the new changes. Thanks

  • I must say these improvements are great! Working with Yoast on my site has been the best addition and I’m wondering how any website can do without it. Your support is pretty awesome as well. Thanks for the continual improvements!

  • What about the courses, will they be updated to?

    Thanks!

  • when are no Canonicals available on the noindex pages????????

    We lose without end visibility because all noindex pages were indexed because of the plugin …

  • Why Subpages of archives no indexing feature is removed. It will create a lot of duplicate content and will result in penalties from google to our blogs or sites. Please reinstate this feature asap. Thanks !

  • Fantastic! Well done, thank you and will update right away…

  • Hi guys,

    I think you missed a word :)
    “We’re longer using a traffic light as our icon”

    Just thought I’d let you know! Looking forward to using 7.0

  • Yoast SEO is a masterpiece within the organization of website therefore it’s experience of plugins another ones the most performing for a good credibility of website.
    Once more thanks.

  • Great update and the logo is amazing. Thank you for the great work. It would be great if you could make Yoast SEO premium better/more advance than the free version :D