This morning (11th March 2015) there was an update released for the famous Yoast SEO Plug-in for WordPress. This applies to both free and paid versions.
More details are to follow but Yoast has highly recommended updating your Yoast plugin ASAP due to a security issue.
Pretty much this floor allows hackers to take control of your WordPress site.
The technical information:
There was a CSRF issue that allowed a blind SQL injection. This means that a hacker could hack into your database and change whatever they wanted. This includes your information and passwords.
This would give a hacker full control of your site and client information.
There is a forced automatic update going out but we highly recommend you jump in early and manually update this plug-in ASAP.
If you are on a very old version the auto update will not work but you should update anyway.
If you do not want to do it or are unsure how to please contact us and we will help you out as quickly as possible.
For updated and further information, visit: https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-security-release/
The Yoast plugin is arguably one of the best SEO plugins on the web today for WordPress. There are so many reasons why SEO needs to be done in a certain way, meet certain criteria and there is just so much to know and learn. This plugin makes life easier, it helps you set the basic title and descriptions but in the background, it does many cool things that you didn’t know it did. This is one plugin worth reading about and learning all of its features.
Yoast will help you ensure the basics are right and also stop you from writing titles and descriptions that are too long a few of the other benefits are:
Showing you a preview of your description to ensure it looks right and captures your audience’s attention.
It will give you an indication of your SEO keywords from Bad, Poor, OK to good. This will help you with what you are writing.
When you publish a new post Yoast will notify search engines of your post and help you get it published.
Your XML sitemap will be updated each time you change your website or add new URLs.
Did you know each page that has a tag on it can create duplicate content on your website? WordPress creates a /tag/ page which has that same information on it. Google doesn’t like duplicate content and can punish you. Yoast will be your best friend here and can stop it.
There are many more reasons but these are some of them that we love.
Contact us if you need assistance with getting your website set up correctly. www.seoempire.com.au
