We’ve released WordPress Plugin v2.5.20, introducing new SEO controls, indexing improvements, bot detection, and advanced execution settings, along with several reliability and monitoring enhancements.
Below is a breakdown of what’s new and what’s improved.
🆕 New Features
🆕 New Features
🔎 SEO Sidebar in Post Editor
🔎 SEO Sidebar in Post Editor
You can now edit your:
Meta Title
Meta Description
URL Slug
directly from the WordPress Post/Page Editor sidebar.
This makes on-page SEO adjustments faster and eliminates the need to switch between screens.
🤖 Bot Detection Layer for OTTO
🤖 Bot Detection Layer for OTTO
We’ve added a Bot Detection & Filtering system with a statistics dashboard.
What this enables:
View traffic from bots
Whitelist trusted bots (e.g., Googlebot, Bingbot)
Blacklist aggressive or unwanted bots
Prevent OTTO from processing pages when specific bots are detected (helps reduce server load)
This feature helps preserve hosting resources and improve performance, especially on high-traffic sites
🌐 Bing Instant Indexing (IndexNow API)
🌐 Bing Instant Indexing (IndexNow API)
You can now submit URLs directly to Bing using the IndexNow API.
To enable:
Generate your IndexNow API key from Bing
Paste it into the plugin settings
Choose which post types to submit
Optionally override other plugins submitting to Bing to avoid conflicts
This ensures faster indexing for updated or newly published content
🧭 Plugin Setup Wizard
🧭 Plugin Setup Wizard
New users now benefit from a guided setup experience to configure core plugin features quickly and correctly.
⚙️ Execution Settings (Advanced)
⚙️ Execution Settings (Advanced)
A new advanced control panel under Advanced Settings allows users to configure:
Maximum execution time
Memory limits
Log size
API throttle controls
Queue cleanup behavior
This is primarily intended for advanced users or enterprise environments running multiple WordPress instances.
🐞 Debug Mode (Auto-Disable & Safety Controls)
🐞 Debug Mode (Auto-Disable & Safety Controls)
Debug Mode can now:
Temporarily override host settings to display PHP errors
Automatically disable after a set period (for safety)
Primarily designed for troubleshooting and support scenarios.
📊 Enhanced Error Categorization
📊 Enhanced Error Categorization
Improved internal monitoring with categorized error tracking to make issue identification faster and more precise.
🤖 Bot Detection & Filtering (OTTO)
🤖 Bot Detection & Filtering (OTTO)
The Bot Detection & Filtering layer allows you to manage how OTTO interacts with bot traffic, helping reduce unnecessary API calls and improve processing efficiency.
You can access it from:
Search Atlas → Plugin → Settings → Bot Detection & Filtering
🧠 Disable OTTO for Bot Traffic
🧠 Disable OTTO for Bot Traffic
Option:
☑️ Skip OTTO processing for detected bots (search engines, crawlers, SEO tools) to reduce unnecessary API calls.
When enabled:
OTTO will not process requests coming from detected bots
This helps reduce:
Unnecessary API calls
Resource usage
Redundant automation triggers
This setting is particularly useful if:
Your site receives high crawler traffic
You want to preserve API quotas
You want OTTO to focus only on real user interactions
📊 You can review bot activity inside the Bot Statistics page (accessible under the SEO dropdown).
📋 Bot Whitelist
📋 Bot Whitelist
This field allows you to specify bots that should always be processed by OTTO, even if “Disable OTTO for Bot Traffic” is enabled.
How it works:
Enter bot names or user-agent patterns
One entry per line
These bots will bypass the global bot filtering rule
Example entries:
Googlebot
Bingbot
Use this if:
You want OTTO to process specific crawlers
You trust certain bots and want automation to apply to them
🚫 Bot Blacklist
🚫 Bot Blacklist
This field allows you to define bots that should always be blocked from OTTO processing, regardless of other settings.
How it works:
Enter bot names or user-agent patterns
One per line
These bots will never trigger OTTO processing
Example entries:
BadBot
MaliciousCrawler
Use this when:
You detect abusive crawlers
You want to prevent automation from running on specific traffic
You need tighter control over bot-triggered requests
📊 Bot Detection Statistics
📊 Bot Detection Statistics
The View Bot Statistics button opens a detailed monitoring view where you can analyze:
Bot detection statistics
Breakdown by bot type
Unique bot entries
Hit counts
This helps you:
Identify high-frequency crawlers
Detect suspicious traffic
Understand bot behavior patterns
Optimize filtering rules
⚙️ Why This Matters
⚙️ Why This Matters
Bot Detection & Filtering helps:
Reduce unnecessary OTTO executions
Protect API usage
Improve performance efficiency
Give you granular control over crawler behavior
This system works at the traffic processing level and is configurable directly inside the plugin settings.
🚫 OTTO 404-Specific Filtering
🚫 OTTO 404-Specific Filtering
You can now filter OTTO suggestions specifically for 404 pages, improving content deployment targeting.
🔄 Heartbeat Reliability Improvements
🔄 Heartbeat Reliability Improvements
Improved internal heartbeat handling to enhance stability and background task reliability.
🔧 Improvements
🔧 Improvements
🧩 Schema Markup Toggle (Per Post/Page)
You can now disable Schema Markup per individual post or page directly from the editor settings.
🏷️ Whitelabel Form Validation
Prevents partial saves unless Whitelabel Mode is fully activated, reducing configuration errors.
🔒 Host Blocking in Whitelabel Mode
Host blocking settings are now properly integrated within Whitelabel configurations.
🔑 Support Token Rate Limiting
Improved enforcement of token rate limiting during login to enhance security and stability.
🐛 Report Issue with Sentry User Feedback (Image Attachments)
Users can now attach screenshots when reporting an issue.
These screenshots are sent directly to Sentry, allowing the support team to better understand and reproduce problems
🔐 MCP Tool API Key Authentication Fix
Resolved permission validation issues for API key-authenticated requests.
🧠 Summary
Version 2.5.20 focuses on:
Better indexing control (Bing Instant Indexing)
Smarter resource management (Bot Detection)
More advanced execution configuration
Improved troubleshooting (Debug Mode + Sentry attachments)
Stability and performance enhancements
If you have questions about any of these features, feel free to reach out to support.