4SEO - All-in-on SEO Joomla extension 6.6.0.2564

2023-08-10 - Version 4.9.0​

new Added feature and alert to optionally block IA robots such as those from ChatGPT to crawl the website
new Added ability to create aliases: another type of redirect which is easier to create, faster to execute but limited in trigger conditions and target URLs
new Added option to override Joomla full page cache plugin when applying redirects rules
new Added full translation to Arabic, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish and Chinese
chg When conservative or progressive caching is enabled in Joomla global configuration, 4SEO can now detect and use for social networks sharing the 'Intro' and 'Full' com_content articles images, as soon as the page is analyzed. Before, it would fall back to using the largest image on the page.
chg Removed calls for translators from admin app footer
chg Added workaround for Joomla 4 issue adding layout=blog to pages, may result in incorrect canonical link
chg Now escaping title and meta description before output else invalid characters may break the page output
chg Now including site host hash and current version in subscribers update authorization request
chg Now using official schema.org notation for dayOfWeek instead of community shortcuts
chg Workaround for Joomla 4 turning spaces in images file names into %20 for local images when used as article images, breaking local image size detection
bug On frontend editing, IndexNow panel spills over footer
bug There should not be a custom field selector input field on the Default person tab of structured data settings

Version 4.8.1​

bug Some redirects are not executed after adding view selection rules parameters in last release

Version 4.4.1​

chg Better CSS at low width for Joomla 4
chg Accept HTML in Google updates detailed description

2022-12-02 - Version 4.3.1​

chg Typos in French translation (thanks GFCom)
bug Error page title may have ' symbol instead of apostrophe displayed under some circumstances
bug Possible Duplicate entry error message displayed after installing previous version (without negative consequences)

Version 4.2.2​

chg Added a filter to pass additional options to the HTTP client used when communicating with Google Search Console. May help for websites which servers are blocked by Google.
chg Inject site name in home page structured data and OpenGraph records. Site name is now used more often by Google in search results, this will help Google get the name right.
chg On sites which started using 4SEO early on, the fake Facebook application id automatically added to OpenGraph may be missing. Not having an app_id is normal but the Facebook debugger has a bug (!) and it shows the lack of app_id as an error - which it is not.
bug Images with encoded spaces in their path (%20) are properly processed but incorrectly added to sitemap, resulting in a broken link
bug Images with very long URLs may be truncated when inserted in the sitemap
bug style and script tags are not removed from content when automatically building a meta description
bug Leading zeros must be preserved in postal codes when generating Structured data

2022-10-19 - Version 4.2.1​

• Added handling of more extensions that use the same item on multiple languages (JomShopping)
• In redirects, the Append back query string option only works as expected for rules with wildcard characters
• Built-in rules to block some spammer robots access are not applied if they have a question mark in the URL specification
• Missing text for HTTPS required to connect to Search Console, only error code is displayed

Version 4.2.0​

• Now detecting and rejecting rules URL specification that have incorrectly UTF8-encoded specifications
• Changed crawler user agent string as some rare servers can block the previous one for 'security' reasons
• Default to using HTTP 1.1 for crawling the website. Allows crawling with some not so well configured servers.
• Changed crawler requests headers names as some rare servers can block the previous ones for 'security' reasons
• Performance improvement: use HEAD requests on external links instead of regular GET. Can be disabled with a filter
• Added simple activity breadcrumb recorder to global error handler
• When URL rewriting is not in use, there may be a double /index.php/ in the canonical URLs automatically injected
• When multiple URLs are listed to trigger a single rule, only the first URL is taken into account
• Possible Data too long for column content_id error when analyizing pages with very long URLs
• (wbLib) Some types of links with specific query variables can sometimes be reported as 404 while they are not

2022-10-05 - Version 4.1.0​

new Added a Purge all button on the Broken links page.
chg Better, more informative display if an error occurs while communicating with Google API
chg Renamed search results 'evolution' to Keyword and Page trackers
chg Display Google connection error message to user instead of just logging it to a file
chg Added a bit more logging to Search Console connection process
bug Incorrectly report links with non-ascii characters in query variables as 404, while they may be actually working
bug 4SEO can freeze if Google Search Console refuses to renew access token for any reason.

Version 3.1.0​

chg - Make rules URL specification match when entered URL-encoded.
chg - Removed deprecated tags from images sitemaps: caption, geo_location, title, license
chg - The sh404SEF import process requires that sh404SEF is installed and enabled. Alternatively, 4SEF can be used instead of sh404SEF - but sh404SEF data must still be present.
chg - Allow AdWords-style IDs in Google Analytics and Google Tag manager rules
chg - Added more cleaning up of CSS selector used for structured data FaqPage question and answers detection, now making sure selector is made up of valid identifiers (no leading numbers in class names, no double-hyphens, etc)
chg - Remove more HTML elements in questions for FAQPage structured data
bug - WHen using Google Tag manager, an incorrect property ID is injected in the noscript version of the tag
bug - Universal Analytics does not report data if adsFeatures are disabled
bug - Search function in analytics snippets list does not work
bug - When creating or modifying a Structured data rule, it is marked as modified when viewing the What to do tab, even if not change is made