Yoast has just released an update to its plugin to version 19.14 that includes many so called “improvements” such as:
Changes the terms “exotic” and “oriental” to be considered potentially non-inclusive in the inclusive language analysis, adds exceptions and updates their feedback.
Improvements such as these are of no use at all to site owners. If I want to use the words “Exotic” or “Oriental” then I should be able to do so freely without a dumb WordPress plugin lecturing me and telling me I shouldn’t. The plugin developers of YOAST are using their position as the most popular SEO plugin for blogs with over 5 million active installations to lecture and scare people into using more “inclusive” language and promote promote harmful gender ideologies in order to rank higher in search engines.
So called inclusive language has no bearing on SEO and certainly shouldn’t have a place in the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. If this was the case then Neo-liberal and Marxist websites such as The guardian would not rank anywhere as these sites obsessively use non-inclusive words when they are ranting about how we shouldn’t use them… however, these crappy websites are are seemingly all over on Google.
By adding “inclusive language analysis” onto our blogs Yoast is essentially creating more unnecessary code that has to load which just slows down websites even more.. which is bad for SEO.
