Yoast’s latest plugin update lets webmasters include an image, avatar or logo in its structured data graph and adds a new filter that can be used to disable link indexation. It also announced that it will be pulling support for versions of WordPress below 5.2 as soon as 5.3 is released.
An image, photo or logo can be associated with the person the site represents.
Why we should care. Like it or not, rich results are showing up in SERPs more and more. Using structured data markup can help search engines understand your content and display it as a rich result. In this particular case, applying it to the image of a person that a website represents may help surface that image on relevant queries and increase traffic.
Yoast typically only supports the two most recent WordPress versions, but they’ve kept supporting WordPress 4.9 to give webmasters more time to switch over to 5.0’s new editor. When 5.3 is released, sites that aren’t at least on WordPress 5.2 may not get the full benefits of Yoast’s schema implementation.
More on the update. Along with some bug fixes, Yoast also included a new wpseo_should_index_links filter that webmasters can use if they want to disable link indexation and added support for built-in taxonomies for those that would like to include their blog archive page in the breadcrumbs.
Beginning with Yoast SEO 11.0, the plugin creator has focused on revamping schema implementation to make it more accessible. Its previous updates have been focused on helping users provide the correct information for Google Knowledge Panels, Pinterest Rich Pins, applying Schema to images and videos as well as customizing what structured data gets shown to search engines. It has been releasing updates just about every other week, so we may see another one around mid-June.
About The Author
George Nguyen is an Associate Editor at Third Door Media. His background is in content marketing, journalism, and storytelling.