Changelog
For everyone:
- Added: Custom Post Types now automatically load Styles and Scripts for the SEO bar.
- Added: Custom Post types now automatically load the custom SEO Settings metabox for custom meta.
- Added: Option to disable indexing/archiving/following on “Media” pages. By default the noindex option is set to true.
- Added: Category Meta Description now completely reflects the front end description.
- Added: Now it’s impossible to output wrong descriptions when you’re using object cache.
- Added: capital_P_dangit function to the Title. Now you’ll never misspell ‘WordPress’ written in your title.
- Added: Title parsing on WordPress 4.4 – Be sure to update your themes ASAP when 4.4 comes out to benefit from these changes.
- Added: Other filters to the Title (as WordPress 4.4 does) that will make the Title more beautiful when special characters are used like quote marks. Go stand out!
- Changed: (textual) Search Archives are now named Search Pages.
- Changed: Upped resized og:image/twitter:image image quality by 16.66% (from 60 to 70). This change is not noticeable as it’s being compressed anyway by the social sites.
- Changed: Sitemap priority differences for posts don’t change for amounts larger than 0.1 anymore when fewer than 10 public posts are available.
- Changed: The Auto Generated Description now uses Transients instead of the Object cache, this is a more reliable cache and doesn’t require a manual flush or a caching plugin anymore. This is now completely automated and prevents Google from ‘thinking’ your description is generated on request since it holds the SEO meta for a week within taxonomies and terms unless the term is edited. This also improves dashboard load time massively (from 100% to unlimited) when many Auto Generated Descriptions for posts or pages are loaded.
- Removed: Genesis per-author robots options output. Since the options have been removed by this plugin. This will be added (including all other taxonomy SEO settings) back in the future.
- Optimized: Improved JavaScript performance and slightly reduced browser resource usage.
- Optimized: Removed a lot of redundant code (which came with optimizations).
- Fixed: Sitemap transient name wasn’t fetched correctly. This could’ve caused a transient conflict with other misnamed transients in other plugins.
- Fixed: The division by zero when you’ve downloaded 2.3.2 instead of 2.3.2a previously. This should’ve affected at most 2 sites but didn’t cause any SEO issues. If it did cause an issue I would’ve pushed a new version number through instead of a character revision. Explained briefly here.
- Fixed: Various Dutch typos.
- Updated: POT File.
- Updated: Dutch Translations.
For developers:
- Changed: Some often used code obtained their own functions.
- Changed: Moved global transient functions to a new respectively named class.
- Removed: admin_run function which has been deprecated since 2.2.4.
- Deprecated: A few “no reason to call” functions in place for more compact right-to-the-point functions.
- Cleaned up code.
Note:
- WordPress 4.4: It’s around the corner and will output a deprecation notice in your title if WP_DEBUG is activated and when you’re using an outdated theme. Be careful about this because it might destroy your site’s SEO value.
- Transients: For now, transients will expire within a week and are cleaned up after post/page/taxonomy update or WordPress core update (after they expire). This means that every future update might not directly reflect changes.
SEO Tip of the Update: (new!)
- Is your domain name just registered? Give it some time. It can take from three to six months before Google thinks you deserve a better spot on the search results page. Google doesn’t really like new domains because new domains often contain spam. While waiting for a higher spot, be creative! Get awesome content out there for when your domain does get some authority :).
- Bing and Yahoo, however, don’t (really) look at domain age, but rather at domain name. So it’s much easier to rank higher early on those search engines. DuckDuckGo is still a mystery but it seems that they look at Geo location, backlinks and titles.