Yoast SEO 22.5 delivers improvements and fixes

Continuing the theme of optimization and refinements, our Yoast SEO 22.5 release includes general maintenance updates across the plugin. We also improved guidance around best practices for taxonomies and a more effortless user experience overall. 

Fine-tuning for taxonomy pages

Taxonomy pages, including categories and tags, are crucial in structuring website content, especially for e-commerce platforms. These pages help users navigate your site and allow search engines to understand the relationship between different pieces of content. However, there has been an ongoing debate about the optimal content for these pages.

Historically, the consensus leaned towards long-form content to provide comprehensive insights and improve SEO rankings. However, based on recent research from our teams, we’ve taken a step back to reevaluate this approach.

Insights from our research

While content is crucial, we found no one-size-fits-all answer to how much content category pages should have. The emphasis was clear: it’s not about the quantity but the quality and relevance of the content that truly matters.

In our in-depth analysis and research, we discovered that excessively long content on taxonomy pages might not always contribute positively to SEO performance. It can sometimes detract from the user experience and dilute the page’s focus.

What’s changing?

For this reason, we have updated the in-plugin guidance for taxonomies to provide better guidance when updating them. This is the perfect opportunity to give these pages a bit of love on your website. If you missed our Yoast SEO Premium 22.3 update, our Premium customers can now use AI to write SEO titles and meta descriptions for taxonomies.

TOC block fixes in Yoast SEO Premium 22.5

We’ve also fine-tuned our blocks for a better editing experience. Sometimes, the Yoast SEO Table of Content block would show an error when changing the heading level of the block’s title. This error popped up when re-opening the post after saving, but we’ve fixed it in this release — making the process error-free again.

In case you missed it, we released a new Yoast Academy course!

Last week, we released our new AI for SEO course. This course is designed for busy small business owners who want to integrate the power of AI into their workflow. The course reveals how AI works and how it will impact SEO best practices. It also discusses the types of AI that are useful when crafting content strategies. All of this can then be transformed into actionable insights.

Update now to Yoast SEO 22.5

Even these smaller updates are pivotal in helping you optimize your website for more traffic. To make the most of the updates available in Yoast SEO 22.5, update to the latest version now!