Yoast News SEO for WordPress & Google by SEO Yoast 13.1

Enhancements:

• Huge performance improvement: moves the XML News sitemap to be based on our Indexables architecture.
• Removes images from the XML News sitemap as they serve no purpose here and this further improves performance.

Other:

• Excludes attachments and non-indexed post types from the possible post types to include in the News Sitemap.

13.0
October 19th, 2021

Enhancements:

• Adds Schema Article News subtypes: ReviewNewsArticle, AnalysisNewsArticle, AskPublicNewsArticle, BackgroundNewsArticle, OpinionNewsArticle, and ReportageNewsArticle.

12.9
August 10th, 2021

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where a duplicate News section would be shown in the Yoast sidebar in the post editor when Yoast SEO Premium is active in combination with WP 5.8.

12.8
July 13th, 2021

Enhancements:

• Adds key/value pairs of all News SEO meta tags to our REST API.
• Improves the performance of the news sitemap. Props to archon810.

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where a database query including duplicate column names would fail on certain database systems.

Other:

• Adds a filter to override the decision to omit an item from the news sitemap. Props to joneslloyd.
• Sets the minimum WordPress version to 5.6.

Enhancements:

• Adds News to the Yoast SEO sidebar in the Elementor editor and the block editor.
• Merges the Exclude from News sitemap and the Googlebot-News index settings from the News meta box into one setting: Exclude this post from Google News. Because both settings served the same purpose, to exclude your content from the News sitemap.
• Removes the Default genre setting from the News sitemap and settings because Google no longer supports Genres for articles in Google News.

Other:

• Sets the WordPress tested up to version to 5.7 and minimum supported WordPress version to 5.6.

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where certain conditions (e.g. using a different admin language) would result in an endless loop.
• Fixes “mixed content” warnings on the News SEO options page.

12.6
August 18th, 2020

Enhancements:

• Adds ‘Article’ as @type to articles that are set to be included in the news sitemap. This results in a @type array with at least ‘Article’ and ‘NewsArticle’.

Other:

• Enables tracking when activating the plugin. It can be disabled in the Yoast SEO configuration wizard.
• Sets the minimum supported WordPress version to 5.4.

12.5
July 21st, 2020

Other:

• Sets the minimum WordPress version to 5.3.

12.4.1
January 14th, 2020

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where a large number of WordPress terms or post types would cause significant slowdowns and possible crashes on admin pages.

Other:

• Removes the code tags from the term and post type names on the News SEO settings page.

12.4
January 7th, 2020

Bugfixes:

• Fixes a bug where the sitemap could be invalidated twice on multisite with MultilingualPress.

Other:

• Show dates in UTC+0 format everywhere.

• Compatibility with Yoast SEO 12.1

• Compatibility with Yoast SEO 12.0

11.7
July 23rd, 2019
Other:

• Compatibility with Yoast SEO 11.7

11.6
July 9th, 2019
Other:

• Compatibility with Yoast SEO 11.6

• Compatibility with Yoast SEO 11.5