Yoast Acquired by Newfound Digital
In what can be described as a major move in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, Yoast SEO has announced it will be joining Newfold Digital. On its Yoast Acquisition announcement blog, Yoast cites Newland Digital’s commitment to WordPress as a major factor in why they chose to sell to Newfold Digital. Before we ponder the ripple effect of this strategic acquisition, let’s introduce the parties involved.
What is Yoast SEO?
Founded in 2010 by Joost de Valk, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins available for WordPress. Yoast boasts over 12 million users and is considered a staple of the WordPress community, going hand in hand with targeted content creation. Yoast SEO helps those who are unfamiliar with search engine optimization and allows them to update their website via search engine ranking improvements.
It works by scanning your page content and then making recommendations on how to set up your pages to rank for better search engine results. For example, Yoast may detect that you are using too complex of a vocabulary, and recommend you simplify your text. Some other examples are missing external or internal links, target keyword density, and whether or not your word count is too low. All of these recommendations are made with SEO growth in mind.
New users are further benefitted by helpful color indicators. Green meaning it is well-optimized, yellow meaning it needs improvement, and red meaning there are critical errors. This usefulness explains why so many sites, including ours, choose to install it.
Who is Newfold Digital?
Here’s where it gets a little confusing. In 2020, Clearlake Capital Group announced an acquisition of Endurance Capital Group (EIG). At the time, EIG was a publicly traded company specializing in IT services. EIG was well known for its own acquisitions in the web hosting/WordPress space, including BlueHost, HostGator, and Domain.com. When EIG was purchased, its web presence divisions merged with Web.com to form Newfold Digital, which was the entity responsible for the purchase of Yoast SEO.
What Does Yoast SEO’s Acquisition Mean for Me?
It is too early to tell. Oftentimes, after an acquisition, some aspects of a business may change. These generally are positive changes, such as improved services or better access to resources. Per the announcement, the products, the team, and offices will remain the same. This goes a long way in maintaining continuity of the brand. For now, it is easiest to assume the acquisition will help further grow Yoast and add some additional resources which will in turn benefit you, the customers.
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