WordPress SEO Premium 1.1

4 April 2014 | 19 Comments | Tags Software releases and updates, WordPress, Yoast SEO, Yoast SEO Premium | By Davey Smeekens

After we released WordPress SEO Premium at January 23rd and WordPress SEO 1.5 at the beginning of March (a major rewrite of large parts of the plugin), we’re now ready to release WordPress SEO Premium 1.1. This new version introduces regular expression support for redirects as well as an even better integration with Google Webmaster Tools and an importer for Redirection.

Regular Expression support

We’ve added a new tab to the SEO → Redirects page where you can add regular expressions:

These regular expression redirects work just like how you’d expect them if you’re used to doing regular expression redirects either in Redirection, in your .htaccess or in NGINX. You can do relative regex redirects, like the first one in the image above. This redirects every URL ending in /feed/ to the URL without /feed/, except for http://yoast.nl/feed/. And, you can do absolute URL redirects, like the 2nd and 3rd redirect in the example above. These redirect large portions of yoast.nl over to yoast.com. We’re in the process of deprecating most info on yoast.nl in favor of having it all on yoast.com as only a fraction of our clients are Dutch.

Of course, just like our normal redirects, you can have WordPress handle these redirects. Or the plugin can write redirect files for Apache or NGINX containing both your regular expression redirects and normal redirects.

Google Webmaster Tools improvements

We honestly underestimated how many errors some people would be importing through Google Webmaster Tools. Which caused it to be rather slow sometimes. We’ve fixed that. With very good server side caching as well as an option to reload all crawl issues from GWT manually. We’ve also added the option to ignore certain issues. As well as a filter that automatically removes the URLs that have already been redirected from the table.

Of course they won’t be really gone, you can choose which view you’d prefer:

There are still improvements to come, like an option to filter by issue type and method to mass ignore issues.

You can also switch the profile we’re downloading issues from, as GWT seems to sometimes do this wrong. For instance, it still returns https://staging.yoast.com for us, even though we’ve changed the verification to https://staging.yoast.com.

Redirection Import

On the SEO → Import & Export page you’ll now find the option to import redirects from Redirection. We know many of you have relied on that plugin for your redirects for quite a while. And up until a year or two ago we used to recommend it all the time. Unfortunately for sites with many redirects it becomes slow and adds all sorts of unwanted cruft to the database. But you’re in luck: you can now safely switch to WordPress SEO Premium!

We’re in the process of building an importer for your .htaccess files and NGINX redirect files as well, so you can truly manage all your redirects in one place.