Yoast SEO 18.8: XML sitemap improvements

Earlier today, Google announced some changes to however they work and enactment XML sitemaps. And conscionable a fewer hours later, we’ve already released an update to our plugins. Our users tin enactment close astatine the cutting borderline simply by upgrading to the latest version.

Stay connected apical of champion practice

The SEO scenery is ever changing and evolving. Google, and different hunt engines, often update their guidelines, algorithms, and expectations. We’re arrogant to accidental that we assistance our users to enactment connected apical of those changes. Our squad perpetually monitors documentation, quality sources and societal media, and we respond rapidly erstwhile determination are important changes.

Not each of Google’s changes are big, though. Today’s update was, successful fact, precise small. But occurrence successful SEO often comes from galore tiny tweaks, changes and improvements. Every tiny vantage counts erstwhile you’re competing against different websites.

So, what changed?

Changes to XML sitemap standards

Today’s changes focused connected XML sitemaps – a large diagnostic of our plugins. Google stopped supporting immoderate forms of representation and video metadata, which we (used to) see successful our sitemaps. For example, they nary longer work captions, titles, and licensing accusation astir images. We’ve safely removed these deprecated properties.

Streamlining sitemaps besides has immoderate affirmative broadside effects – those files go smaller, faster, and easier to generate. At scale, that’s large for vigor depletion and large for the environment. At Yoast, we’re each for creating a sustainable satellite (wide web) for everyone.

Isn’t this accusation valuable?

It whitethorn travel arsenic a astonishment that Google is declaring that they don’t privation to cognize important accusation astir your images and videos. We cognize that successful the satellite of SEO, metadata, captions, and different accusation tin assistance them to amended understand, process, and fertile your content.

Thankfully, you don’t request to worry. XML Sitemaps were archetypal introduced successful 2005, and the web has changed a batch since then. Google tin extract cardinal accusation straight from images and videos – and for everything else, they tin usage structured data from your content. That’s overmuch much businesslike than bundling other accusation into sitemaps.

What changed?

In today’s update we region each <image:title> and <image:caption> properties from <image:image> structures. From present connected the <image:loc> spot volition beryllium the lone spot near successful representation metadata. This applies to each of our WordPress plugins.

Our technical documentation astir XML sitemaps has been updated to bespeak each the changes.

Yoast Video SEO

We’ll besides update our Yoast Video SEO plugin to region the pursuing properties from video metadata:

• The allow_embed property (and value) connected the player_loc property.
• The class property.

Stay up to date

Today’s update is 1 of the galore tiny tweaks, changes and improvements that we’re perpetually making to our plugins. Getting the latest mentation means that your tract volition ever beryllium arsenic fast, efficient, and optimized arsenic possible; truthful it’s important to marque definite you’re up to date. It’s clip to update!