Tips Tuesday – 403 Forbidden Error, Astra 3.0, DIY SEO Quick Start

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• New rewrite rule in WordPress 5.6
• Why some folks are getting random 403 Forbidden error messages
• Why you need to get super duper serious about your passwords
• What’s so funny about Google finally crawling our sites using HTTP/2
• My advice about updating to Astra 3.0
• YouTube launches product tags and what this means for affiliate marketers
• Why you need to check and change your Follow settings for the BlogAid Facebook page
• Big changes to my site audit and migration request forms turning into applications
• DIY SEO Quick Start Challenge has begun just ahead of our live workshops

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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday

I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. It’s a great way to get the deeper story on what’s reported in Tips Tuesday. And, I almost always have breaking news for the day too. So come join us live for the party.

Replay

Who I Help

All tips, advice, and suggestions in this, and all BlogAid posts and tutorials, are intended to empower DIY site owners who are serious about making money with their sites and are not on hosting that is restrictive in what you can and can’t do with your site and hosting setup. If you have any doubts about what type of host you are on and if the tips I give will work there, see this post on What is Managed Hosting?

BlogAid Happenings

Holy flipping cow, last week was cra cra!! Was it for you too? If it wasn’t, it will be, as we have some new global issues to deal with.

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m getting damn tired of “here’s a new thing we added to your site or hosting and didn’t tell you about but causes issues – have fun!” stuff that seems to happen with regular frequency these days.

The two latest ones include a new rewrite condition in WordPress and a possible new ModSecurity rule. I’ll tell you about both of those in just a bit.

But aren’t you glad to have someone digging into it for you?

I hope you will actively tell your blogging buddies about BlogAid as a way to say thank you. That’s especially important in blogging FB groups, where it would be helpful to get some backup on what I advise and recommendations for my services.

Follow BlogAid on Facebook – Update Your Settings

Now first, I want to ensure that we don’t lose touch on Facebook.

They are dropping Likes for pages.

So you need to ensure that you are actually Following BlogAid, not just Liking that page.

I changed the primary action button to be Follow, instead of Like, (thanks Larry) so hopefully you can just click that. Please know the Like thing still shows, so ensure you click the Follow button.
And one of my peeps, Jan Carroza, let me know that she had to make some additional changes to her Facebook Follow settings. She clicked on the 3 dot More ellipsis, and then clicked Follow Settings. And then you can set it as a Favorite or Default, depending on how you want to see posts from my page.

And I’m sending a big thank you to Jan for taking the time to let me know and send screenshots for those settings too, and for help from my BB Hub site audit client members for verifying the new Follow button.

Site Audit and Migration Request Forms are Now Applications

As y’all know, I’ve been very concerned about my wait list for site services getting too long. We are currently into May, at least.

And one of the things really slowing down open projects happens right out of the gate, especially on host migration requests, where we have to do a bunch of things to get detangled from the current host first.

Many of those things, like transferring your domain to a real registrar, and moving your emails to Google Workspace (formerly known as GSuites) can be done ahead of time.

Plus, there were way too many surprises on new projects, as the clients didn’t tell me everything that was going on with their sites, or about work done by other site techs that turned into real messes to clean up. 

That’s mainly because I didn’t ask enough questions.

And other projects ended up being things I don’t even handle, like enterprise-level e-comm sites.

So, I’ve done something about that.

Instead of simple request forms, there are now application forms for both site audits and migrations. And I ask a lot more questions on them too. 

Plus, I removed most all of the text above the form, as folks just weren’t reading it, and put a colored box of text at the top letting folks know I have a standing wait list of at least 3 months. If that’s going to be a problem, then there is no point in them even filling out the form.

I also put a checkbox at the end of the site audit request for folks to agree that they understand this not a “dump it on the tech” service, as I was getting way too many of those requests too.

On top of changing the forms, I contacted every new client that is currently on my wait list and asked for the additional info I put on the applications.

And sure enough, we were able to get folks started on some of the things they will need to do prior to migration so we can hit the ground running when the project does open.

These changes have saved us at least a month of delays already, so I’m really glad for that, and I know you will be too.

DIY SEO Quick Start Challenge has begun

We just finished up our first week of the Quick Start Challenge for the DIY SEO course.

This gives everybody one quick thing to check on their site a day to ensure their Yoast and Google settings are all correct.

Folks are always amazed that they have things to change every year we do this.

But that’s SEO for you!!! It changes all the time!!!!

We have another week or so to go on this Quick Start Challenge and then we’ll be diving into our live workshops.

FYI, the replays for last year’s workshops are still posted, but there is a note above them that the info is old. So if you’re new to the course, you may just want to wait for the new workshops.

Last year, I had removed the old workshops just as the new ones were starting. And that made some folks who got into the course over the summer pretty upset that they didn’t have access to the replays.

So, this is the compromise I struck to try to keep everyone in the course happy.

That’s all the news from around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

WordPress Tips

New rewrite rule in WP 5.6

In all site audits lately I’ve seen a new rewrite rule in everyone’s .htaccess file.

RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]

I dug into it and discovered that it was added by WP 5.6 as part of the authentication needed for the new password authorization security WP also added.

SEE: What’s New in WordPress 5.6 for more on the new REST API authentication with Application Passwords.

Security Tips

Random 403 Forbidden error

Several site owners have been reporting that they are intermittently getting 403 Forbidden errors when trying to login or work on their site.

I’m seeing it across a couple of hosts, and being reported by a couple of my clients, and then some folks in blogger groups who are not my clients yet.

My leading theories are that it is related to this new rewrite rule in .htaccess (that WP added with 5.6) or it is yet another new security rule with ModSecurity at our host.

We’ve gone through something similar when trying to save settings in UpdraftPlus. But it was very consistent and super easy to connect with the action we were taking.

This latest hoohaa is not so clear, as it is super random, and pops up during different actions on different sites.

So, I created a post so we can all report what we are seeing, and potential fixes to put the power of the village to work for us and get to the bottom of it.

Get super serious about your passwords

Your site security begins with you.

Be sure you are using super strong passwords that are at least 16 characters of gobblty goop.

And that you have a unique password for every account.

You might want to consider getting the LastPass service to help you with yours. I can’t use it as I regularly sign into the same vendors for myself and for client work, and it gets totally confused.

But it will help you generate and keep all of your strong passwords. I believe it’s free for one device, and maybe $1/mo for multiple devices.

SEO Tips

Google now crawling with http/2

Geez. It took Google 4 years after declaring all sites need to be HTTPS to start crawling them on HTTP/2. (HTTPS is required to get on the faster HTTP/2 protocol.)

And this announcement comes just a few months ahead of HTTP/3 becoming the new standard protocol too.

Wonder how long it will take them to catch up to that?

Microsoft Clarity – no go

If your site is verified on Bing, then you may get an email about the official launch of Microsoft Clarity (Microsoft owns Bing).

I have chosen not to use this service as Microsoft will have access to the data.

Oh hell no!

Conversely, Google does not have access to your data in either Google Analytics or Search Console.

And shout out to my good buddy Marilyn Lesniak for the heads up on the email from Microsoft.

Theme Tips

Astra 3.0 released

Astra recently released a huge update to their theme framework.

My suggestion – wait a couple of weeks prior to updating. 

Take backup first.

And get into the Astra Facebook group so you can ask questions if it breaks anything.

Same goes for the Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg plugin from them too, which also had a major update and has some bugs.

Now folks, you know that I don’t regularly cover theme and plugin updates unless I see something that I know we all need to hold off on for a while.

So, don’t expect regular updates on whether it’s okay or not to update your theme or this or that plugin.

Just know that I consider all things Astra as beta these days.

Now, I still love Astra stuff, but they are now running too far ahead of WP core changes, and are not doing good beta testing ahead of their major releases.

And you may want to look back over the last several Tips Tuesdays for more comments on that.

Video Tips

YouTube launches product tags

While this is a limited beta release right now, I think it speaks volumes about the power of creating video these days – and the power of doing ecomm with videos too.

I’ll be keeping my eye on this for us, as I think it has a lot of potential for affiliate marketers.

So go read the post and see what’s going on.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

Gimme some love!!

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