Yoast SEO Added Support For Baidu In Version 7.3

Yoast SEO is the only plugin that I use for improving my on-site SEO because it makes my content better. The plugin is visually appealing and comes with a lot of functionality for analyzing your content. The plugin focuses less on scheme mark-up or working with BuddyPress and bbPress and more on your content (which is what really matters). Let's check out what Yoast SEO Version 7.3 brought to the table. Changelog Release Date: April 17th, 2018 Enhancements: * Removes the intl polyfill and shows a message on browsers that don’t support this feature. * Adds Baidu Webmaster Tools verification support. * Adds import functionality for Premium SEO Pack. * Adds import functionality for Smartcrawl SEO. * Adds import functionality for Squirrly SEO. * Adds import functionality for Platinum SEO Pack. * Adds import functionality for SEO Framework. * Adds import functionality for Greg’s High Performance SEO. * Adds import functionality for WP Meta SEO. * Improves the social data import for the wpSEO.de plugin. * Removes the debug data from the admin pages, which were only showing when WordPress is in DEBUG mode. * Applies Select2 to all select boxes on breadcrumbs page. * Attempts to reset opcode cache during the upgrade routine. * Changes the wording for the Ryte indexability check on the features tab. Bugfixes: * Prevents hard casting to array in the WPSEO_Link_Columns::add_post_columns method signature. * Fixes a bug where an error is thrown when MySQL has the sql-mode set to ANSI_QUOTES. * Fixes a bug where the pagination overlaps the cornerstone information message, on post overview pages in combination with low resolutions. * Fixed a bug where the keyword filter doesn’t work on the post overview page. * Removes HTML entities from the HTML comment that appears for admins when there’s no meta description on a post or page. * Changes JSON+LD organization output to always point to #organization on the homepage instead of the current page. * Fixes a bug where non-public taxonomies were shown in the breadcrumbs. Other: * Minor internationalization improvements. * Security hardening.

Ok Now Back To Me, I Know You Won't Read All That

99% of this update is regular improvements and bug fixes that 1% of people would have cared about. However, I wanted to highlight one super useful feature that this update introduced. If you couldn't tell, it was highlighted in big bold letters. Yoast SEO 7.3 added support for Baidu. Most people do not know what Baidu is, but think of it as Google for China. In my opinion, this was a long overdue feature. I am left scratching my head at how long it took to add support for a search engine that is bigger than Bing and Yandex. Combined, Bing and Yandex are possibly bigger, however I did not do the math. Buy hey, it sounds right!

So, Who Cares?

I do because WordPress plugins and themes often have very poor support for international platforms. For example, lack of RTL support for themes or lack of translations available for themes or plugins to virtually anything else. This is a GOOD update because it  highlights that China does have internet access.

On A Serious Note

Yoast SEO's team does a great job with constant plugin updates, however there are times where I am left scratching my head at how some glaringly obvious features are skipped over. Cough cough, BuddyPress and bbPress.