Most releases are all about incredible new features or fixing a gazillion bugs with the help of the community. But sometimes, there’s a small release that is unfortunately timed just before a big one. There may not be any new game-changers in Yoast SEO 8.4, but does that mean it shouldn’t get its own release post? Of course not! So, my dear Yoast SEO 8.4, here we are!
Keeping up with our two week release schedule, we’re releasing Yoast SEO 8.4 today. While we’re gearing up for something pretty awesome in the next couple of weeks, we wouldn’t want to leave you hanging for too long.
New in Yoast SEO Premium: Synonyms in taxonomies
In Yoast SEO 8.4, we’re expanding a feature for our Premium users. It is now possible to optimize your taxonomies for multiple focus keywords and synonyms. We’ve also added the keyword distribution assessment to help you check and improve your focus keyword use in taxonomies. To make this happen, we have introduced a new wpseo_taxonomy_content_fields filter so we can add the additional fields to the taxonomy metabox.
Don’t have Premium yet? What are you waiting for? You get a redirect manager, internal linking suggestions, synonym support and much more. Go get Yoast SEO Premium!
Enhancements
In this release, we improved compatibility with Gutenberg so the latest changes in the new WordPress editor won’t break Yoast SEO. In addition, we now only support Gutenberg versions 3.9 and up. A community contribution by Emily Leffler Schulman this time. She suggested we add a margin below select fields to create space for breadcrumbs between taxonomy settings. Thanks, Emily!
Bug fixes
This time, we had time to fix a small number of pesky bugs. In one case, we fixed a bug that showed the cornerstone content toggle for attachment pages. We’ve also fixed a bug from the future. Sometimes, the Search Console page displayed ‘first detected’ and ‘last crawled’ dates that were in the future.
Update now!
Yoast SEO 8.4 is out now. It’s not a very big release, but we’re putting just as much love into small releases as we do in big releases. That being said, there’s something brewing at Yoast HQ, but it’s all very hush-hush. Keep an eye on our SEO blog or subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest!
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