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Yoast SEO 19.12

In Yoast SEO 19.12, we're introducing the inclusive language analysis — previously only available in Yoast SEO Premium. This will help you get feedback on words that might exclude part of your audience and get inclusive alternatives. This is only available in English for now. Plus, it is opt-in. Try it! Find out more about what's new in Yoast SEO 19.12 in our release post!

Enhancements​

  • NEW in Free: Adds the inclusive language analysis for English as a beta feature. Get suggestions on how to improve non-inclusive phrases, to make your content appeal to a larger audience.
  • Improves the Integrations page to explain more clearly the different types of integrations.
  • Adds integration cards for The Events Calendar, the Seriously Simple Podcasting and the WP Recipe Maker plugins.
  • Adds a new Website name text field in the Site Representation step of the First-time configuration.
  • Improves the subheading distribution assessment by adding highlighting and also targeting long content before the first subheading.
  • Improves the First-time configuration styling.
  • Improves the transition words assessment for Arabic by removing some transition words.
  • Improves the Yoast admin bar menu with more functionality and better links.
  • Removes a notification that prompts users to help with translating the plugin in the language of the site.

Bugfixes​

  • Fixes a bug that would affect users managing the cron jobs with a plugin on PHP 8.1 after they have performed a core upgrade.
  • Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown when trying to create breadcrumbs from unindexable items.
  • Fixes a bug where blocks with a NULL blockName would trigger deprecation errors with PHP 8.1 and cause performance issues. Props to @dustyf.
  • Fixes a bug where breadcrumbs markup would not validate due to improper nesting and closing of span tags. Props to @michaelbourne.
  • Fixes a bug where highlighting would not be removed from the text after the analysis is updated and the present highlighting has become irrelevant.
  • Fixes a bug where the Baidu Webmaster Tools link would go to the wrong page. Props to @SavPhill.
  • Fixes a bug where the content analysis would not load when editing web stories in the Web Stories plug-in.
  • Fixes a bug where the highlighting functionality would not be working when highlighting content in lists items in the Block editor in WordPress 6.1.
  • Fixes a bug where the <title> tag would potentially be missing when publishing a story with the Web Stories plugin. Props to @swissspidy.
  • Improves line ending handling for robots.txt contents.

Other​

  • Introduces a notice on the WordPress dashboard and the Yoast SEO dashboard to let users know we are dropping support for PHP < 7.2 starting March 1st, 2023.
  • Reduces noise from PHP 8.1 deprecations.
  • Improves compatibility with PHP 8.2.
  • Allows using the yoast_seo_development_mode to override the wp_get_environment_type() result to production.
  • Deprecates the built-in integration with the The Events Calendar plugin, following the release of its version 6.0.4 which integrates with Yoast SEO.
  • Disallows setting or unsetting any dynamic properties on Abstract_Main.
  • Removes the note in the readability analysis results that tells users that the Flesch reading ease score has moved to the Insights section.
  • Removes the Yoast i18n package.
  • Resolves a typo in the feedback string for the phrase exotic in the inclusive language analysis.