What's new in EasyDNN News 9.3

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Damir Kapustic

We are aware of the importance of successfully exposing your articles and blogs to a large audience. High rankings on Google and opportunities for some of your articles to go viral can have an incredibly positive impact on your business. That’s why the new version of the EasyDNN News module brings its already-excellent SEO abilities to a whole new level. Improvements include AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), structured data (Schema.org), Facebook Instant Articles, templates for Open Graph and Twitter Cards settings, and improved Canonical URLs functionality.

We are very excited to present you this significant upgrade of our module. These new features have great potential to help you get most out of your all articles, blog posts, and any other content which you publish in the EasyDNN News module.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source standard of coding for publishers. The goal of AMP is to allow publishers to load their content onto their mobile devices quickly as desktop versions of content can be difficult and time consuming to download onto mobile devices. Google is now recommending using of AMP. AMP can improve your SEO and AMP articles will be marked as Fast in search engine result pages.

With this version, AMP is now supported in the EasyDNN News module. Use and configuration of this functionality are very simple; all you need to do is to turn on the functionality in the module settings and adjust a few settings. After that, AMP versions of your articles will be automatically created. Note that the AMP pages will be created only for articles that are available to non-registered users. If the articles aren't publicly visible, then Google can't access the articles so AMP wouldn’t have much sense. See the documentation.

Structured data (Schema.org)

Structured data or Schema.org is a semantic format to add metadata to HTML of your webpages to improve the way search engines read and present your page on search engine results pages. Schema.org is a result of the collaboration of the leading search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Adding the Schema markup controls the rich snippets displayed under the page title in search results. Thanks to rich snippets, Google and other search engines can display additional information about your page, telling users if the result is an article, event, review, product, etc.

By using structured data, owners of websites can benefit from increased click-throughs, because visitors have better information about the page content and its relevance to their query before they visit the page. For now, we don't know how much structured data impacts SEO rankings, but we know it helps search engines better understand the content on your pages, and the rich snippets it creates increase potential visitors' interest in your content.

With the new version EasyDNN News 9.3, Schema.org is supported. We’ve built a template system which enables the use of different templates for structured data depending on the types of content that you publish. For each article, you can select the template to be applied, or you can edit the article's metadata individually. See the documentation.

Facebook Instant Articles

Facebook Instant Articles is Facebook’s version of Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). The purpose of Facebook Instant Articles is to accelerate the loading of articles on mobile devices. When someone clicks on an article which you have shared on Facebook, the article opens on your website. Statistics show that this tends to take too long on mobile devices. That is why Facebook has offered Facebook Instant Articles as a solution where content is stored on their servers to enable faster opening of articles on mobile devices within the Facebook application. According to Facebook, by using Facebook Instant Articles, mobile web articles open twenty times faster, article readability increases by 20%, and probability of abandonment decreases by 70%. Facebook Instant Articles also enables monetization of content by displaying Facebook ads within articles.

EasyDNN News now supports Facebook Instant Articles. This feature is available to publisher of all sizes from all over the world, but you have to provide at least 10 articles for a one-time review before Facebook enables the use of this service on your company's account. The instructions on how to set-up Facebook Instant articles you can find here.

Open Graph and Twitter Cards settings templates

Support for Open Graph and Twitter Cards already existed in EasyDNN News. In version 9.1, we have added the ability to customize Open Graph and Twitter cards. Previously, if no changes had been made to articles, then the default settings remained. This has now changed in version 9.3 allowing you to create and use templates. Depending upon the type of content that is being published in a module instance, you may set the template. In addition, a template can be selected for use within each article with the possibility of editing Open Graph and Twitter Cards meta data in each article.

Improved Canonical link function

The canonical links function allows the webmaster to avoid duplicate content in EasyDNN News by specifying which version of the articles on the website is standard or preferred. Until now, this functionality has functioned by enabling the Canonical links functionality in the instance of the EasyDNN News module where we have displayed the main or preferred article version. This has now changed in version 9.3 allowing you to redirect from each instance to the instance of the news module where the main or preferred version is displayed.

Glossary functionality

A new Glossary function has been added which makes it possible to filter articles alphabetically. Although the English alphabet is standard, you may use whatever alphabet you want.