Tips Tuesday – Canva Alternatives, Ahrefs Blocked, Gutenberg Tutorials, Video SEO

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• The deep rabbit hole I went down with video SEO this weekend
• Running niche sites entirely with vlogs
• I’m the only SEO that seems to know a big secret trick that I’ll teach you
• Status on our wait to update to WP 5.8
• New Gutenberg Ninja tutorials are underway
• The insane poll results from pro SEOs for nofollow sponsored tag use
• Ahrefs getting blocked and why that service will confuse you
• Google changes messaging on Page Experience no longer being a tie breaker
• Google simplifies Page Experience report and why it’s still worthless
• Why I’m thrilled that Team Yoast is working on persistent user settings for WP
• A popular GDPR cookie plugin turns into a paid service
• The best Canva alternatives for creating graphics fast

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Spill the Beans Livestream tonight

Do join us live tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. We spill the beans on this week’s news, breaking stories for the day too, and special info just for those who watch. And the replay is available here on this Tips Tuesday post later too. But the live party is so much more fun.

Replay

Who I Help

All BlogAid posts and tutorials are intended to assist business-minded, hands-on bloggers and webmaster designers who are serious about making money and who want to stay up-to-date with site changes.

BlogAid Happenings

Well, I’ve gone and done it now!!! I got a new bush trimmer and I got so happy cutting with it during the nice weather break last week that I stressed out the tendons in my left hand running from the bottom of my thumb down the inside of my wrist.

I’m in a thumb stabilizer split.

I can still type and mouse, but it’s much slower at my desk with a regular keyboard than on my laptop.

And, after a while it stresses my wrist anyway, so my emails and Facebook group replies and such to y’all may be a little shorter.

It’s getting better and I’ll probably be out of that splint by tomorrow or so.

Deep dive into Video SEO

This past week I’ve had a LOT of back and forth with Yoast support on their Video SEO plugin. I wasn’t all that crazy about some of the schema markup it adds to the post as a wrapper for the video schema markup.

And since my hand was keeping me out of my wood shop in my off time, I went down a 4 hour rabbit hole with my iPad as I sat on the deck Friday night and investigated all manner of ways to do the schema markup.

And then I tested the markup on several big SEO sites. Plus, I tested a few other plugins like RankMath, which outputs VERY different schema markup and is not at all equivalent to Yoast SEO.

After a LOT of digging, I have a much better understanding of why Yoast changes the markup they way that they do when video schema is in play.

But you will not believe what else I found!!!!

And not just about the schema markup either.

Niche sites run on video

I got a deep look at how some folks who run niche sites are doing their marketing.

With a niche site, there is no blogging.

But there is a TON of vlogging.

All of their marketing outside of ads is done on YouTube.

I’ll have more info soon for those in the BB Hub and Video SEO Booster course as I finish my testing this week.

Nobody is teaching what I’m teaching

I was also stunned at how little info there is about video SEO where your blog is concerned.

I mean, even the SEO gurus are missing all manner of opportunities!

So, I’m pretty stoked about my Video SEO Booster course and how folks who implement these tactics are going to be lightyears ahead of everybody else.

This week I’ll be circling back to recipe video SEO tests, depending on the availability of my tester helpers, as they are traveling too. 

I’m only testing with the top 2 recipe plugins, including all free and paid versions of WP Recipe Maker and then the recipe card in the Grow plugin.

Site Services update

My wait list is solidly into October and nearing November.

For those who I guessed we would start in the July/August range, I’m doing a lot of juggling right now as so many folks at the top of my wait list are on vacation.

So, I’m bumping up as many folks down the list as I can right now, and then will circle back to folks who were not available.

Just saying that timeframes I guessed at when you sent in your request may not hold this month.

WP 5.8 update status

I’m not hearing too many folks screaming like crazy about the 5.8 update. But, I’m thinking that may be because fewer folks have update yet.

With the things I have heard folks complain about, I’m thinking that we will wait for the 5.8.1 update this time. I have no idea when that may come out. 

I’ll keep you posted.

Gutenberg Tutorial updates underway

I think the majority of the Gutenberg updates that came in with 5.8 are stable. So, I’m starting my investigation and testing with them so I can make my whole tutorial list.

However, I won’t be updating the Gutenberg Ninja course with the new tutorials that have just 5.8 updates until well after I let you know it’s okay to update to 5.8.

There’s just no point in putting up tutorials that replace how your site looks right now, is there?

But I do want to get busy with a few other tutorials, like Reusable Blocks, and such that have changed and have tips and tricks for how to use them now.

And I can hardly wait to have a look at the new Patterns Block Directory too.

I’ll be sending out emails to course members as I release the new tutorials.

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

SEO Tips

Do you use nofollow, sponsored, or what?

Well, this certainly muddies the waters.

Previously I had reminded y’all that you need to tag your affiliate links as both nofollow and sponsored, except maybe for Amazon links that perhaps you can just mark as nofollow.

And a week after Google announced its link spam update, an SEO posted a poll on Twitter asking other SEOs how they marked up their affiliate links.

Here are the results:

• 38% are using follow
• 39.8% are marking them nofollowed
• 22.1% are using sponsored

When asking those not using sponsored now if they plan to in the future:

• 33. 5% said no, they will keep as follow
• 33.1% said no, keeping as nofollow
• 33.5% said yes, they will add sponsored

With this small adoption rate of nofollow sponsored among pro SEOs, I’m betting Google will deem this one more thing they can’t trust us to do, and they will just make up their own AI minds about our links.

Bottom line, I’m not sure it’s going to matter what you do with your links.

But, I would at least try to follow best guidelines to please all of the search engines and at least make them nofollow.

And then, of course, abide by any TOS (Terms of Service) from your affiliate vendors.

Ahrefs blocked

Not many of my clients use Ahrefs. But in the past week, 2 of them have reported that they are getting an error message that Ahrefs is blocked by robots.txt

Now, we don’t have anything in robots.txt to block Ahrefs.

And it’s very likely that they just blame it on robots.txt just like Google does when they can’t crawl something.

So, I’m guessing this is getting blocked at either Cloudflare or the host.

Ahrefs says they have some code so you can allow-list them. I’ll get a look at what that is this week so I can update my notes and have that handy for support for my BB Hub folks.

Ahrefs will confuse you

And for anyone thinking of using Ahrefs or other such tools to give your site an SEO audit – keep in mind that so many of the things it checks carry little to no weight with Google. At least half of the things they tell you to fix can be ignored too.

Honestly, I think tools like that are more about quantity than quality metrics.

They bombard you with a bunch of meaningless tests and info so you’ll buy their product to help figure it all out and fix it.

Google Page Experience is more than a tie breaker

Google has had us on a roller coaster with their new Page Experience metrics, including Core Web Vitals.

At first they just said it would be a ranking factor.

And then when they saw all of the hysteria over it, and folks not getting their sites fixed until the last minute, they decided to delay the rollout.

And they started downplaying the whole thing, saying that it was basically a tie breaker between somewhat lower authority sites that were otherwise equally ranking.

And now they are saying that it is more than a tie breaker.

It always has been, but it is a surprise change in their messaging, and one that will likely just confuse site owners even more.

SEO Roundtable has a nice post on this, and I want to pull out a few quotes from it for you, where they quoted Google’s John Mueller.

“As an SEO, a part of your role is to take all of the possible optimizations and figure out which ones are worth spending time on. Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of “recommendations”, most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site’s visibility in search. Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience.”

Okay, that quote is in line with what I mentioned previously about Ahrefs and other such tools. And that includes the analyzers in SEO plugins. Hardly anyone is my DIY SEO course uses the plugin analyzer. And me and most all of my course members have super high ranking posts that don’t pass those tests.

Here’s another quote from John:

“The other thing to keep in mind with core web vitals is that it’s more than a random ranking factor, it’s also something that affects your site’s usability after it ranks (when people actually visit). If you get more traffic (from other SEO efforts) and your conversion rate is low, that traffic is not going to be as useful as when you have a higher conversion rate (assuming UX/speed affects your conversion rate, which it usually does). CWV is a great way of recognizing and quantifying common user annoyances.”

Well, Google, what the heck does “random ranking factor” mean?

But I will say he is spot on with the User Experience (UX) part of his statement. It’s not all about speed. If your site is so covered up in ads and pop ups and such that nobody can even consume the content, then they just leave – and they never come back.

Another thing the article points out is that some folks are blaming lower traffic on the Page Experience update when in fact that only slowly started rolling out on July 15. Any ranking changes are more likely due to the regular June and July core updates.

Google Simplifies Page Experience Report in Search Console

Have y’all been checking your Page Experience report in Google Search Console?

It’s not all that helpful, is it?

And I have found that if you monitor it every day for a month or so that you’ll see wild swings in it as their CrUX report data floats through. It’s based on data gathered from real Chrome users who have all manner of devices and connection speeds.

Plus, it’s 28 days old.

That report is just not something you can look at once or twice and make good decisions with regard to improving Page Experience on your site.

It’s also why I use a variety of testers and settings in my site audits because each one of them gives us different clues about how to make your site speed better.

Well, Google has decided to simplify that report by removing the Safe Browsing and Ad Experience widgets, plus fixes on how missing data is handled.

I seriously doubt that will make the report any more accurate, though. And I advise folks not to waste too much time with it. There are far faster and more productive ways to see what’s going on with your site.

WordPress Tips

Persistent user settings coming

I’ve really been enjoying Yoast’s new blog posts on the work they are doing in WordPress core updates.

One of the reasons I have such great respect for Yoast is that they sponsor WP by paying staff to be “volunteers” on the WP core development team.

And their post series titled “A Week With Us” is full of quick summary reports from each of the team members. 

And last week they reported that they are working on the team that is going to refactor how Gutenberg keeps some user settings, which is at the browser level.

Now, normally, WP settings have been kept in the database for each user.

But since Gutenberg, many settings are not user specific, like the preference for full-screen editing or not. That one drives me bat crazy, as I hate it.

Plus, we get to see that Gutenberg Welcome screen every time we purge our browser cache too, as it loses that cookie.

Well, that’s the very stuff team Yoast WP volunteers are going to help correct.

The refactoring they are talking about doing is having more of this Gute preference stuff saved in the database per user, just like WP has always done with other settings.

But as Ari says:

It’s a process that will require multiple changes in the way the editor stores data. As a result, it will take a while to properly fix while accounting for backwards compatibility to make sure existing preferences are maintained and synchronized.”

So they may not be able to get this pushed through for the WP 5.9 release late this year. Doesn’t matter. I’m just thrilled to hear that it’s being addressed and I know you are too.

And I may send them a case of beer when they do get it done.

Plugin Tips

Termly Makes GDPR Cookie Consent Banner plugin a SaaS product

If you’re using the GDPR Cookie Consent Banner plugin, Termly has just acquired it and has turned it into a SaaS product.

SaaS stands for Software as a Service.

There is still a free tier, but has an insanely low limit of supporting only 100 unique viewers a month.

Users of the plugin are not very happy with the changes.

But, this happens a lot, where a dev makes a great free plugin, but the support gets to be too much from not only end users, but the rapidly changing WP core code.

So, they sell it, and the new company overhauls it and takes it in a different direction.

Sometimes that’s a good thing, like when Automattic purchased Woocommerce.

Same with the caching/optimization plugin W3TC. 

But, there have been acquisitions where the new parent company went evil with the plugin too.

So, that’s why I keep a close watch on news like this.

It’s also why I was nervous when iThemes purchased Kadence.

So far they have remained hands off with all themes and plugins they have purchased, but there is no guarantee it will stay that way. Let’s hope so. I’m no fan of iThemes.

Graphics Tips

The best Canva alternatives for creating graphics fast

I think Canva is fantastic! 

But, for a non-graphics person like me, it can also be overwhelming. 

The nice folks over at Blogging Wizard have a super post on alternatives to try.

I believe all of them are a paid subscription, but do check them out as the different templates and customization options they offer may be just the inspiration you need to give your graphics a fresh, and eye-catching look.

And some can handle audio and video too, so that’s definitely worth checking out.

Wrap Up

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

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