We’re back with another powerful update!
AIOSEO 4.8.0 is here, and I’m so excited to introduce advanced tools to fine-tune your website’s crawlability, prevent unwanted indexing, and improve performance.
Let’s dive into what’s new.
Crawl Cleanup Supercharged
Keeping your site’s crawl data clean is crucial for SEO and performance. We’ve upgraded our Crawl Cleanup feature with smarter controls. I’m really excited about these as they give you greater control over how search engines crawl your site.
Here are some of the key highlights:
Internal Site Search Cleanup
Websites often generate unnecessary URLs from internal searches, leading to wasted crawl budgets and potential spam.
With this update, we’ve given you the power to control this. Now you can:
- Set a maximum character limit for search queries, preventing bloated search URLs.
- Automatically filter out emojis and special characters to avoid cluttered or nonsensical search terms.
- Block common spam patterns, keeping junk searches from creating unnecessary indexable URLs.
Left unmanaged, site search can cause more harm than it benefits you
Redirect Pretty URLs to Raw Formats
Another powerful feature we added to Crawl Cleanup is the ability to redirect pretty URLs to raw formats.
Just so we’re on the same page, let’s quickly define these 2 types of URL:
- Pretty URLs: These are user-friendly and SEO-friendly URLs that are easy to read and remember. For example, example.com/search/example is a pretty URL for a search query.
- Raw URLs: These are more basic and typically include query parameters directly in the URL. For example, example.com/?s=example is a raw URL for the same search query.
Redirecting pretty URLs to raw formats ensures that search result URLs are structured consistently, reducing duplicate pages and keeping your site’s SEO in check.
Prevent Crawling of Internal Site Search URLs
Internal search pages don’t need to be indexed. Unfortunately, when search engines find them, they still crawl them. However, with AIOSEO 4.8.0, Crawl Cleanup automatically adds disallow rules to your robots.txt to prevent search engines from crawling search-related URLs.
This includes URLs such as:
- ?s= (WordPress default search query parameter)
- /search/
- /page/*/?s=
By blocking these, you avoid unnecessary crawl requests and keep search engines focused on your key content.
Block Unwanted Bots
Ever wished you could block unwanted bots from crawling your site?
Bot traffic can easily overload your server and hurt performance. That’s why we decided to give you full control of which bots can crawl your site.
With AIOSEO 4.8.0, you can:
- Block all unwanted bots or select which ones to restrict for more control over your crawl budget.
- Primarily target AI crawlers, preventing them from indexing your content without permission.
- Protect your content from unauthorized AI training.
- Reduce server resource usage, ensuring bots don’t slow down your site.
These changes will modify your robots.txt file, adding disallow directives for the chosen bots. To avoid errors, AIOSEO will display a yellow alert so you can review and track updates.
These bot-blocking settings are now built directly into the robots.txt editor to make management easier.
And this is what the robots.txt file will look like:
Improved Query Arg Monitor
Tracking parameters like UTM tags are essential for analytics. Unfortunately, they also have some SEO implications that can impact your performance. For one, they create duplicate URLs, which can negatively impact SEO. Our updated Query Arg Monitor helps fix this by optimizing UTM parameters.
AIOSEO now automatically replaces ?utm_ parameters with #utm_ equivalents via a 301 redirect. For example:
https://example.com/?utm_medium=organic redirects to https://example.com/#utm_medium=organic
Why does this matter?
- Prevents duplicate URLs in search results.
- Saves server resources since # fragments aren’t sent to the server.
- Keeps tracking intact while improving SEO efficiency.
While query args are useful, they can create SEO and performance issues if not managed properly. This is why properly managing them is essential—it gives you the usefulness of query args without having to sacrifice SEO performance.
In addition to these exciting updates, we’ve made several notable improvements to many features you love. You can see all our changes in our full product changelog.
So, what are you waiting for?
Update your site to AIOSEO 4.8.0 to unlock these powerful new features and optimize your site for efficiency and better search rankings.
If you’re not yet using AIOSEO, make sure to install and activate the plugin today.
If you have questions about these features, please comment below or contact our customer support team. We’re always ready to help. Our commitment to making AIOSEO the easiest and best WordPress SEO plugin is only getting stronger as we continue to help our customers win.
I’m so grateful for your continued support, feedback, and suggestions. Please keep those suggestions and feature requests coming!
I hope you enjoy using these new SEO features as much as we enjoyed creating them.
-Benjamin Rojas (President of AIOSEO).
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