Tips Tuesday – Cloudflare Changes, Save Your UA Data, New Google Crawlers and Filter
Tips this week include:
- All the tutorials are written for the new EZ Metrix course
- Cloudflare tightens security again – new setting updates
- Cloudflare Page Rules will be deprecated – need to be migrated
- Why site security equals speed
- GTMetrix got a makeover
- Save your Universal Analytics data now
- The WP 6.6 release squad has some big names
- WP Rollback hits the 300k+ install milestone
- Google releases 2 new crawlers
- Reddit is showing up everywhere in search
- What is Google’s focus for search now?
- New Web filter for Google searchers that may make your blog posts show up
- Are Google AI Overviews the future of search?
- Big AI announcements from OpenAI and Google
- Is AI coming for your niche?
BlogAid Happenings
Was last week filled with a bunch of chaos for you too?
I could not get into a groove with anything because of one small fire after another popping up that I had to put out.
They weren’t burn the house down fires or such, but they kept me hopping from one thing to another every day.
I checked in with a few webmasters and clients and it was like that for them too.
Let’s hope things are calmer this week for us.
And the dry spell of news is over too. I’ve got lots of tips for you this week!!!
EZ Metrix Update
I’m delighted to share that all of the tutorials are written for all 7 pages of the reports in the new EZ Metrix course.
There are at least 4 tutorials for each page that help you answer any question you have about your site traffic, SEO, and YouTube channel.
This week I’m building out the membership site. And I’ll be bringing my beta testers in to check out all of the new written tutorials.
And then I’ll see if they would prefer video tutorials on some of them. But I think the written tutorials with screenshots give all the details you need and are easy to follow.
And then I’ll be putting together a live webinar so you can see this thing in action!
Cloudflare Changes
One of the things that had me hopping from one fire to another this past week was Cloudflare.
Security Tightening
They have tightened the security rules to the point that nearly every visitor to a site is seeing a splash screen that they are being checked before they are allowed to see the site.
That was causing some visitors to turn away from the site because they thought it had been hacked.
We found one cause and the fix, which I sent out to all of my site audit Hub clients and Webmaster Training members, and we thought that was the end of it.
But noooooooo.
Then Cloudflare changed another setting and it started all over again. We found that too, and it’s all okay now.
And let me tell you, from what I’ve seen in audits this year with the bots hitting sites, Cloudflare is totally justified in tightening that security!!!!!!
So, we’re glad to be able to get all the extra security and still not have that splash screen.
Moving the Rules
There are 30+ settings in Cloudflare that need to be configured for max security and speed.
Some of those are in rule sets for different functions.
To improve the flow, Cloudflare needs to change the order of how it does its checks on what can and can’t access your site.
We’ve been using one of those rule sets for at least a decade.
And now Cloudflare wants us to move it to the more modern way and flow of how they are processing rules.
I made a tutorial for Webmaster Training members so they can do it for themselves and their maintenance clients.
And, I will be inviting all of my site audit Hub clients to do a live session with me so I can make these changes for them, as it is a little bit too techie, and it has to be exactly right.
Security = Speed
Folks, there is no such thing as set-it-and-forget-it with site security.
Besides being hacked, all those bot hits are chewing up your limited hosting resources that should be reserved for humans.
Hosts have to throttle your site over, which slows down your load speed.
And the only remedy they have for you is to buy a bigger hosting package to get more resources.
That just gives the rats more room to run. It doesn’t fix the problem.
I was in a blogger group last week where a site owner was trying to make their site fast. And I was stunned to see how many folks are still replying that they need to move to better hosting as their first fix.
You know what that does?
It temporarily knocks out the bots that were hitting directly on the host IP.
And when those bots find your new IP, the issues start all over again.
The fact is, sites can be made fast at any host – if you know how to fix them.
And it all starts with proper security.
Get an audit and get your site fast and secure by actually fixing the problems, and not just taking wild guesses or throwing plugins at the problem.
Webmaster Tips
GTMetrix Gets a Makeover
One of my favorite performance tools, GTMetrix, just got a facelift.
And, they have some new functionality changes too.
This tool is one of the best for seeing what’s going on with your mobile load times.
Unlike Google PageSpeed Insights, you can set GTMetrix for real-world conditions of your target audience.
And it gives FAR more info about the load than GPSI too.
But, I’ve been running into issues with it giving internal errors for the past couple of weeks, as have some of my webmasters.
And that was before the new design appeared. So, maybe they rolled in a few bugs with the new features and I hope they get them worked out soon.
Analytics Tips
Save Your UA Data
Around the first of the year I advised everyone to download their Universal Analytics data for 2023.
You will need to do another download before June ends.
Access to UA is going away on July 1.
Here are tips to help you get your data now.
WordPress Tips
WP 6.6 Release Squad Announced
The folks who will manage the upcoming WP 6.6 release some big names, including Matt Mullenweg himself as the lead.
I’m so glad to hear that, as more complaints are coming in about how WP is coded now, with too many things inside things and too many JS calls.
I hope that happens.
More importantly, I hope they take a deep dive into the mountain of old bug fixes and ensure the existing code is as clean and bug free as it can be.
Plugin Tips
WP Rollback Hits 300k Installs
This is one of my fave plugins because it has saved my bacon, and that of my clients so many times.
If a plugin update goes bad, you can roll it back to a previous version.
SEE my tutorial: How to Restore Plugins to a Previous Version with WP Rollback for details on the method to use every time you do updates on your site.
SEO Tips
Taking a Week Off from DIY SEO Workshops
Our next series of workshops in the DIY SEO course will be for keywords.
However, with all that we can do in the GSC reports in EZ Metrix, I need to slightly revamp the workshops to include a demo of the difference in doing keyword research on the web or with other tools compared to doing them in Looker Studio.
So, we’re going to take a week off while I update the workshops.
Google Releases 2 New Crawlers
Google just announced that it has launched 2 new web crawlers for images and videos.
They say
- The info will be used for research and development
- They will not be used for AI – there is another bot for that
- There will be no impact on rankings
FYI, if you don’t believe the scraped images and videos will be used for AI training, go read the big AI announcements post in the AI Tips section below. Google already has an AI video generator that is so real that they can’t even release it to the public.
Reddit Is Showing Up Everywhere
Back in February, Google struck a $60 million deal with Reddit. And those forum entries have been dominating the top of Google Search ever since.
Now OpenAI has struck a deal with Reddit too.
And as the Search Engine Journal article points out, there is concern over credibility and accuracy with info that is in Reddit threads.
After all, it’s just a bunch of folks giving their opinions.
What is Google’s Focus Now?
With the HCU update, Google was trying to get rid of non-authoritative sites.
Yet it replaced many of the top search results with Reddit forum results.
The only thing I can conclude is that Google thinks people helping people in forums is more trustworthy than bloggers who write about a topic endlessly.
Maybe we should all start answering questions on Reddit now just to get our “expertise” on page 1 of Google. I’m not kidding. And I’m looking into it for the DIY SEO course.
Google’s New Web Filter for Search
Page 1 of Google Search can be an overwhelming mess of images and videos and ads.
And Google takes notice when we don’t click on anything there and instead scroll down to see more titles with links instead.
That’s likely why Google is testing a new Web filter for search.
It gets rid of most of the clutter (not the ads) and shows just titles with links.
It’s almost like a throwback to old Google before internet connection speeds got fast enough to show images and videos and such.
Keep an eye on your metrics to see if your posts start getting more hits as searchers start using this feature.
Are Google AI Overviews the Future of Search?
Google has been experimenting with AI overviews, which are like summaries of posts.
Some folks are up in arms about having any of their content included in it.
For over a year now I’ve been advising not to deny access to your content by AI bots from both Google and OpenAI, as it may be the only way to get your content seen in the future.
But this latest experiment from Google has been a disaster, as has just about every other AI thing Google has released in the last 1.5 years.
I just don’t believe there is any QC happening at Google anymore – and here’s why. Multiple articles have come out after each failed release with insiders saying that nobody can say the poop stinks at Google.
You can read more about the overviews in this Yoast post.
But honestly, I would not worry about these too much. Google is just experimenting and they’ll take this iteration of it down and eventually replace it with another.
AI Tips
Big AI Announcements from OpenAI and Google
The 2 AI giants tried to outdo each other with their new AI releases last week.
You can read all about it in the latest AI Discover Hub newsletter and post.
Is AI coming for your niche?
During our live site audit chats I always do a consult with my Hub clients to hear how things are going with their online business, what new things they have in mind, and what things are coming down the pike that will affect them.
Here are the niches that I think AI are going to impact the most.
Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got the rest of these tips. Subscribe now!
