Yoast SEO will offer an update to allow press sites to remain properly referenced on Google.
Europe attacks, France applies, Google responds
In previous episodes: last spring, the European Union voted a directive on copyright that forces sites that refer press articles to pay them. France is the first country to transpose this copyright directive into law: it will enter into force at the end of October.
But Google has fought back: from the end of October, the visibility of (European) newspaper articles will be degraded on the search engine. Only the titles will be displayed, the excerpts and the photos will disappear, and Google will not give a dime to the titles of press. However, if you want to keep your visibility on Google, just add parameters to the tag META name="robots". You will still not earn money but you will remain properly referenced on Google.
Yoast SEO adapts
A large number of press sites are based on the WordPress CMS. Most use plugins to refine their SEO and Yoast SEO is one of the most popular. If you publish a press site on WordPress and you use Yoast, good news: you will be able very easily to indicate to Google that you wish to preserve a suitable referencing.
Yoast SEO announces that an important update for the press sites will be available tomorrow, Tuesday October 1st: Yoast SEO 12.2. The developers of the extension decided, by default, to open the doors to Google. All your web pages whose tags META name="robots" do not include the indications noindexor nosnippet will automatically obtain the priorities max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1 to indicate to Google that you agree to be fully referenced (text excerpt without limit, images in large format and video extract without limit).
You will have nothing to do to enable this setting: it will be added by default to all pages of your site, whether or not it is a European press site. Yoast rightly believes that the simple fact of using an SEO plugin justifies the automatic opt-in because you are looking to get the best performance on Google. The only action to plan is to install the update Yoast SEO 12.2 which will be proposed tomorrow. Developers who want to change the default added options will be able to use the filter wpseo_robots to reduce their visibility on Google.
If you do not use WordPress and Yoast SEO, you can follow our tutorial to stay fully referenced on Google after the application of the copyright directive.
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