Tips Tuesday – Image SEO, Speed Tests, Featured Snippets, Cloudflare and GSC Warnings

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Part 1 of the Image SEO Workshop is this Thursday
• Whether it’s safe or not to update to WP 5.7
• New Gutenberg Ninja tutorials on the way
• The themes on our list for deep testing
• New super deep WebPage Test and GTMetrix tutorials underway
• The snag I hit in the Video SEO tutorial making
• All manner of goofy stuff we’re seeing with our sites like:
• Seeing the WP admin bar after we log out
• Red error banner from Cloudflare
• Post links changing in WP
• Why I think the Bing URL Submission plugin is a good thing to use
• A Google Discover Case Study that explains why we’re not getting seen in it
• Proof that Google Featured Snippets dropped to record lows
• The search engine me and my DIY SEO folks are paying more attention to now
• What’s up with the Cloudflare email about deprecated cookies
• What we’re looking into with the Search Console email about SharedArrayBuffer support

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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday

You’ll most definitely want to join us live 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, like all the goofy stuff happening right now that I’ll be telling you about today. So come join us for the party and the scoop on what’s happening.

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

Oh, we have some serious goofy going on around the web right now.

Plus, I have been a testing and tutorial making maniac this past week, and will be again for this week too. 

And I’ll tell you more about both in a moment.

Image SEO Part 1 Workshop on Thursday

First, I want to remind my DIY SEO course members that Part 1 of our Image SEO Workshop is this Thursday.

Did you know there are 15 levels of SEO you can get on every image?

Yep!!!

And that’s why we have to split this topic into 2 workshops. There’s just that much to cover.

Update to WP 5.7

I believe it is safe for most folks to update to WordPress 5.7 now.

I’ve only heard of a few minor issues with Astra and one or two with other themes.

My BlogAid News subscribers received instructions on Sunday for how to do the update.

Be sure you’re subscribed to get extra perks and info like this.

Gutenberg Ninja updates underway

And now that most folks will be updating to WP 5.7, it’s time for me to get busy making updates to the Gutenberg Ninja course for the new features and changes that rolled in with WP 5.7.

I’ll be sending an email out to all course members when those are fully released.

SEE: What’s New in WP 5.7 video tour and post for a peek at the changes.

Theme Testing update

Me and my top 2 designers have been going after it again this past week as we continue to dig ever deeper into Core Web Vital issues and fixes in the themes.

And, I put an invitation out to my Webmaster Training members to join the testing team as we prepare to set up for the new case study on the following themes:

• Genesis
• Astra
• GeneratePress
• Kadence

We may include themes for OceanWP and Blocksy into a later case study. But this is more than enough for now. 

And, it’s plenty for any designer to keep up with this many themes too.

In fact, most don’t. They find a favorite and stick with it for most all of their design projects.

But, we think that it would be a better idea to spread your knowledge over a few themes so that if one goes haywire or doesn’t keep up with WP changes, you have choices still, and it doesn’t tank your whole business.

We’ll be checking these themes for:

• Raw speed
• Core Web Vitals
• UX and ADA compliance
• Schema markup output, including compatibility with Yoast SEO

New WebPage Test and GTMetrix tutorials underway

Before we get into these new theme tests, I’m publishing a slew of super deep tutorials on my top two online testers, which are WebPage Test and GTMetrix.

As you may recall, I previously reported that GTMetrix completely rebuilt their tester from scratch.

And it has some super helpful Core Web Vitals data now, especially on the paid version for mobile.

But, now that CatchPoint has purchased WebPage Test, that has left the original creator, Dan Meenan free to do some upgrades and add new features.

And he recently added a new feature for Core Web Vitals that is so sweet I could kiss him!!!!

It helps us easily identify 2 of the biggest CWV issues, which are Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

There have also been improvements to the mobile testing features and settings too, and those help tremendously with finding CWV issues.

I’m going to work with the new mobile features for a while longer, but I still think the paid version of GTMetrix is a little better for mobile.

I’ll be rolling in the new WPT tutorials as I make them this week to the Performance Section of the Webmaster Training course. And I’ll be sending an email to all course members when they are finished. 

And then I’ll get started on all of the updated GTMetrix tutorials.

Hit a snag with Video SEO tutorials

This past week I was working with one of my site audit clients and Yoast SEO support for why her Video SEO plugin was not outputting the proper schema markup on a post where she had a video embedded.

Turns out that it was only on that one post and was working elsewhere, so how lucky were we to test the only one that wasn’t?

But, I will say that Yoast has always been pretty cryptic about the settings in this plugin. 

And I’m going to be working with this client, and any others that already have the plugin, to run some tests on the different settings and options.

And I may have to get with Yoast support to better explain a few of them too so that I can be super sure that I’ll be giving my course members the right info.

So, this bump in the road has delayed me a bit with testing. And I hope to get back on track with it later this week and at least finish out the last section for embedding your video in your post while I wait for support to get back to me, if it comes to that.

Your patience is appreciated

I told you I was a tutorial making maniac!!!! So, please bear with me as I juggle all of these tasks along with my client work.

Site Services update

Speaking of client work, we are very quickly moving through the wait list. 

That’s mainly because I had several clients in a row who came in for their annual audit checkup. Those are fast and cheap compared to the initial audit because those site owners are educated in DIY site ownership and they keep their sites fast and secure. I just update what has changed as I go. And if there is anything additional, we are usually done with it in a day or two.

I also had to juggle a few folks who came to the top of the wait list at the first of this month, as they were in the middle of other things or had some life situations happening.

So that bumped up about 5 folks who were further down the list and they were thrilled to get going earlier than expected!!

We’re into mid June at this point for folks just now coming on the wait list.

So, if you want a site service before summer, best contact me now.

And if you are a previous site audit client, do check when your annual time comes up and contact me then so you don’t go over the 18 month mark and will still qualify for a checkup. After 18 months it requires a full audit as too much will have changed.

It’s a whale of a lot faster and cheaper to keep on top of it!!

Interviewed new tech for Email and other help

Me and my webmasters loathe setting up email for clients. 

That’s because there are 14 ways to set stuff up. Yeah, the basic setup is the same for all, but clients have different ways they like to connect, or setup things on their mobile device and such. 

Plus, transferring emails from the host to a 3rd party email service is often required too.

The fact is, me and my webmasters specialize in different things like site security and speed, theme design, Google My Business, etc. And we hire each other for as much as we can.

Nobody can know everything.

So now and then we need outside help for things like email setup and some dev work that is out of our wheelhouse.

We’ve had a couple of nice techs who did the email things for us, but that was not their primary biz and they got overloaded with the things that were their main focus and had to drop doing side work for us.

So, I put out the word again that I was searching for someone and was thrilled silly with who answered that call.

Not only can he help with the email, like Google Workspace, formerly GSuites, and Zoho, but he can do any type of SMTP work for member sites and such too.

Plus, he had all manner of other qualifications and ideas that he and I will be going deeper into soon. I can’t let the cat out of the bag on it yet, just know that I’m pleased to have found him and see us doing big things together.

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

Caching Issues

Seeing WP admin bar when visiting site after logging out

I started seeing this issue a week or so ago.

I logged out of my site, and then later opened a new browser tab to simply visit my site to view it logged out. And I saw my WP admin bar at the top, as if I were logged in.

When I clicked to log out, it displayed the message asking if I were attempting to log out.

This is exactly what it would do if you were logged in and had other pages/posts open in other tabs, then logged out on one, and tried to log out again on one of the other tabs.

So, it is logged out.

Now one of my clients is reporting the same issue.

We are on different hosts, so that rules that out.

We have different caching plugins, so that’s ruled out.

And a vendor visited her site to view it and saw the same thing, so that rules out browser caching.

We are both on Cloudflare, though.

But, we have page rules that should make Cloudflare bypass cache on admin pages.

So I’m scratching my head on this one.

Cloudflare red banner with error 

Last week I reported that me and many of my clients are seeing a red banner at the bottom of our screen with an error message any time we try to either access or save settings in our Cloudflare plugin, or when working directly in our Cloudflare accounts.

Sometimes the message runs by so fast we can’t even read it.

I had to make a video of it so I could stop the frame and write down the error when I was working with Cloudflare support on this.

And I got exactly nowhere with them.

The thing is, our Cloudflare plugins are still connected and our sites are being delivered by Cloudflare.

So, I don’t know what’s going on.

And I don’t know if the WP admin bar thing is another symptom of this.

Please do let us know if you’re seeing goofy stuff like this too.

Post Links changed

Two folks, who are not my clients, have reported that WP is changing links on their posts.

Both are due to a caching issue.

I don’t yet know what plugin they are using, or if both are on Cloudflare or not. One is for sure.

Get updates and breaking news in livestream 

I record the podcast late on Monday and I usually have follow up info and/or breaking news in my Tips Tuesday livestream on Tuesday evening.

So be sure to join us live or catch the replay later on in the post. It’s the only way you can keep up with some of this goofy!

SEO Tips

Google is sending more invites for new Search Console Beta

Have you gotten an email from Google with an invitation to get their new Search Console Insights that integrates with Google Analytics?

I was a beta tester for it back in September.

SEE: Google Search Console Insights Beta: First Look for my review of it.

It’s okay for a quick snapshot of how you’re doing with both metrics. But, I wasn’t all that impressed with it. Nor is it a substitute for true data mining in both apps.

So, if you have not received your invitation yet, don’t worry. I don’t think you’re missing much.

Bing URL Submission plugin

A few bloggers, but none of my clients, have received an email from Bing Webmaster Tools encouraging them to use their Bing URL Submission plugin as a supplement to Bing crawling their sites for new or updated content.

The fact is, Bing just can’t hold a candle to Google’s global infrastructure to drive bot crawls across the web.

So, they want you to give them some help by manually submitting your URLs for crawling anytime you have a new post or you update a post.

And I think that’s a great idea, but, who wants to do manual labor – nobody.

And that’s why they came up with this plugin that will automate the process.

So I’ll be making a tutorial for the DIY SEO course members on how to do it.

My only concern with this plugin is that it keeps logs in your database of what has been recently submitted. So we’re going to keep an eye on that and see how fast it fills up, and/or if there is a way we can clear those logs periodically.

If not, I may get with the devs to give us an option for that.

And this plugin makes it easier to use their secure API connection too. 

But, if you want to do batch submission via their API tool without a plugin, see this post from SEO Roundtable. 

Google Discover Case Study

When Google Discover first rolled out, I think many of us were pretty excited for a new way to get featured in mobile search.

But, for most of us, it turned out to be a dud.

And I think this informal case study from the nice folks at Moz may explain why.

It’s definitely worth a read, even if you run a craft or foodie site instead of a news site because he looked at all manner of sites, including sewing and such.

Please do let us know if you ever made it into Discover and if it has been a boom or bust for you.

 It’s been a bust for me.

Featured Snippets Drop to Historic Lows

Another reason you may be losing traffic from Google is that the number of Featured Snippets it shows has now dropped significantly, according to recent data collected by the nice folks at Moz.

Do jump over to the article and see the chart of what has taken the biggest hits, including:

• Health
• Finance
• Hobbies and leisure
• Family and community
• Home and garden
• Travel and tourism
• Food and groceries

Dang!!! Those topics represent the majority of my clients who run ads on their sites!!!

And many of my DIY SEO course members regularly got Featured Snippets too.

So, this is a big hit.

I will also say that I saw a report on Monday that Google’s Featured Snippets are recovering, but still!!!!

Get a better search engine

I don’t know about y’all, but the entire first page of Google just looks like one big blob of ads to me.

And this is why so many folks are switching to Bing as their default search engine. Yeah, it has ads and products too, but not the entire first page!!

And this is also why we are paying more attention to Bing in the DIY SEO course as well. We’ve been seeing a significant increase in traffic from that search engine for nearly 2 years.

Security Tips

Cloudflare email about deprecated cookies

Did you get an email from Cloudflare about them getting rid of their CFDUID cookie?

If so, don’t worry about it, as it doesn’t affect those of us on the free or Pro plans, to my knowledge.

Some upper paid levels of Cloudflare have ways for folks to tie their own bad bot detection to this Cloudflare cookie and will need to make other arrangements for that once this cookie is gone.

But we aren’t doing that, that I know of.

Beyond that, it was a way for hackers to get a clue if they were being flagged by Cloudflare or not. Now they won’t have that feedback.

So, this is a good thing, I think.

Google Search Console Email about SharedArrayBuffer, COOP and COEP issues

A couple of my clients who run ads got a notification from Search Console about issues with the above and that support for it would change in May.

They contacted Mediavine, who is looking into it, and that makes me think the issue is on them

I sure hope we don’t have to add another HTTPS security header, but I think the one we have now is the bare minimum for cross site origin.

So, this may be an additional one we add for better cross origin isolation. We’ll see.

Wrap Up

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

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