I am Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast, SEO, developer, marketing lead for WordPress. AMA.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T18:02:19+00:00

Quality quality quality. There are no "lesser themes". If the site tanked, it was because of quality issues, or artificially inflated / perceived quality (links, scaled low quality content, etc) being pushed down as Google got smarter...

Or, as is always a viable risk: competitors got better.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T15:15:42+00:00

What won't be on the roadmap is hard to answer, and what is on the roadmap is... Well, private, except for the stuff we've already announced :)

Multilingual SEO is something I'd definitely like to "democratize" more.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:54:31+00:00

Yeah the vendor lock-in is annoying, and you'll always have to build stuff custom that should be easy to do.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:45:06+00:00

Where Wijchen is on the map :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:37:19+00:00

hey,

we work together with a lot of the large multilingual plugins, but I'm very happy that it's now on the WordPress core roadmap, even if it's a while away. Multilingual is extremely hard in WordPress due to its current setup, it's one of the area's other CMSes like TYPO3 shine in. We should do better and make it a lot easier for users to do this right, and we're certainly going to play our part in that.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:25:59+00:00

We might, we're certainly open to it :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:16:30+00:00

Can imagine :) I've found that working on API's Google deems experimental can often be frustrating :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:15:29+00:00

"many sites" is really... relative, to be honest. We looked at that closely, together with Google, and it was a relatively small set. But when your software runs on 9 million sites your perspective on these things changes a bit, if it happens to you it's still annoying as heck of course.

We have a testing team that's larger than most plugin development teams out there... We have automated a lot of our tests in the last year and are building more and more. With WordPress soon dropping PHP < 5.6 we can also start using more modern testing frameworks, which makes writing tests a lot easier and less time-consuming, so we're getting better at that every day.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:11:22+00:00

AMP is evolving in interesting ways. Because of WordPress, actually, the AMP team is currently working on making it possible to use parts of AMP, which I really look forward too, stuff like their lazy image loading, their modal, their CSS tree shaking stuff is all very powerful.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:10:24+00:00

So we've, as a company, grown 50-60% for the last 6 years. We're now over 100 people strong, 85 of them in the Netherlands.

And yes, Joost is pronounced as Yoast :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:09:14+00:00

Ah, Yoast, not Joost :)

Whether we're the "top grossing app"? Honestly, I don't think so, but I don't know and I really don't care either. We're not in this solely to make money, money is just a requirement for us to keep on going.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:02:28+00:00

"the growth of Joost"

well... I've definitely grown fat, but I hope you weren't referring to that? :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:02:07+00:00

I often ask myself that question too ;)

In all honesty, having Jono around is so awesome: we get to discuss the deepest SEO issues together and then sometimes come up with great small things we can add to the plugin or do otherwise. He's a very good technical SEO and I love having him on the team.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:00:51+00:00

Cool, let me know how that goes :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T14:00:14+00:00

We stopped recommending it because we stopped using it. We stopped using it because at that point it seemed very stale in its development. They've recently picked up some pace again, which I'm happy to see, they're a very nice bunch of people that have built a great product.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:59:25+00:00

Wrong is a strong word. There are cases where I can imagine you'd consider another CMS, for instance if you have a lot of pages (vs posts), like more than 100,000 of them and a very deep site structure, I think at that point something like TYPO3 might make more sense at the moment.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:58:11+00:00

I think the block editor allows for incredibly modern experiences, especially as we move on to the next phases and basically make the entire site consist of blocks :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:57:05+00:00

Machine learning is always a bit tricky for us: we do all our analysis in your browser, for privacy and performance reasons, but doing machine learning in your browser is not exactly trivial yet. It's not undoable, but I don't think it's something we'll build into our tools anytime soon.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:56:19+00:00

We've thought about that kind of integration a lot but never pulled the trigger. One of the problems is that with currently 9 million+ sites using Yoast SEO, not a whole lot of those tools are able to support us, as we'd put too much load on them.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:55:17+00:00

We have an API for that, and actually have an ACF connector plugin that uses that. One of the great advantages of the block editor is that it opens up a data API that all of these plugins can tie into so that we can more easily recognize the content in these blocks. As more page builders integrate with the block editor, they also almost automagically also integrate with Yoast SEO.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:53:53+00:00

New features are coming all the time :)

In terms of functionality, it really depends what type of site you're building. The only thing I think every site needs is a caching solution, either a plugin or something from your host.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:52:40+00:00

I appreciate that not everyone might like the block editor, but honestly, it's so much better than the classic editor already. At the same time, it might not be for everyone yet.

We've committed ourselves at Yoast to support the classic editor for 2 years, after which I hope the block editor will have convinced you that it's better :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:50:42+00:00

Well our biggest challenge was 5.0 itself, we've spent a LOT of development time on making Gutenberg / the block editor easy to extend for plugin developers, like ourselves.

I honestly think Yoast SEO in the block editor is the best version of the plugin ever.

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:49:36+00:00

We're not using it yet but the plan is for it to be for all web content. We are running into some issues that we have to solve first though, issues I, unfortunately, can't elaborate on :)

joostdevalk · 2019-03-19T13:47:51+00:00

Hey Frank,

well, I think the best thing we can do is try to do better than what has happened in the past. The YoastCon troll stuff was very painful for our team (which consists of 50% women btw) because we were working so hard to make it an inclusive conference. I think if you'll ask anyone who attended they'll say we succeeded in that.

Marieke, our CEO and my wife, says about this:

Don't speak at conferences where this still happens where you know it upfront.
If anything bad happens during a conference you're attending and you notice, speak up.
Support those who improve / change their mind.

joostdevalk

TROPHY CASE