In response to Google change, Yoast SEO will opt users into all snippet features by default

Yoast SEO users will be opted into all of its snippet features by default, the WordPress plugin developer announced Thursday. The update containing this change, version 12.2, will be released on October 1.

Why we should care

On September 24, Google announced new snippet settings to provide site owners with options to limit the content included in their search listings. These new settings are part of Google’s response to the first implementation of the European Copyright Directive by France, which was in part aimed at getting Google and other internet giants to pay for use of publishers’ content in its results. Google says it won’t pay publishers in France (or other EU countries that follow France’s lead), and they must opt-in to have their snippets presented in Google results.

“Because this potentially affects so many countries, we’ve decided to make a change for all Yoast SEO users,” the Yoast announcement reads. “We realize that this means that we’re opting you in to all of these snippet features in Yoast SEO. I think it’s fair to say that if you use Yoast SEO to optimize your search results, we can assume that that’s what you want.”

More on the announcement

• If you do not want to use all of Yoast SEO’s snippet features or would like more discretion over how your snippets display, you may not want to update to version 12.2.
• The announcement also states: “you might want somewhat more granular control over these values, if that’s true, please let us know in the comments.” It is a possibility that Yoast will provide site owners with more options in a future update.
• Meta robots can be used to opt into having all of your snippet text, videos and images being displayed on Google Search.
• Unless a page is set to noindex or nosnippet, every page will have max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1 added to its robots meta string.
• If you want to change the robots meta value, you can do so by using the wpseo_robots filter.

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About the author

George Nguyen

George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix, where he manages the Wix SEO Learning Hub. His career is focused on disseminating best practices and reducing misinformation in search. George formerly served as an editor for Search Engine Land, covering organic and paid search.