Tips Tuesday – Increased Spam, New Webmaster Tutorials, DIY SEO Jump Start

Happy Ho Ho Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Gutenberg webinar is coming soon
• What new tutorials are up in the Webmaster Training for Designers course
• When we will start the DIY SEO Jump Start checks and what new big thing is coming to the course
• Time is running out on the BlogAid holiday deals, so get your goodies now
• The continued uptick in spam that we’re experiencing and what it means for our site security
• Why I was banned from a woodworking Facebook group that is a must read for all crafters and those who rely heavily on Pinterest for their traffic
• What was in the WordPress 5.3.2 release
• How to update to WordPress 5.3 if you haven’t yet
• What’s up with the new checkboxes on reports in Google Search Console
• What you should do if you get an Authenticated Origin Pull warning email from Cloudflare

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No Live Show Tonight

There will be no live party tonight on the BlogAid Facebook page, as it’s Christmas Eve. And the podcast is a little shorter this week too, as I know most of y’all are crazy busy this week.

BlogAid Happenings

This week I’ve been making my lists and checking them twice to help me organize all of the new tutorials and posts I’ll be bringing you here on BlogAid and in BlogAid courses.

And two of those posts will be a year in review for my Hobby to Money Making Site series and a year in review for BlogAid.

And that will be followed by two posts on my goals for each site in the new year.

Gutenberg Webinar Coming Soon

As you know, I finished all of the new tutorials for the Gutenberg Ninja course last week.

And recently I did post on 8 Pages You Can Make in 15 Minutes with Gutenberg. 

They’ll show you why I keep saying you don’t need page builders anymore. And boy are they fun to create!!!!

So now I’m putting together a free Gutenberg webinar for you, so you can get more details plus ask questions. I can’t wait to show you just how far Gute has come and just how powerful it is!!!

I’ll have details on that webinar for you soon.

New Webmaster Training for Designers Tutorials are Live

As soon as I finished up those Gute tutorials, I immediately jumped into updating tutorials for the Webmaster Training course.

The first set of new tutorials was how to do a full HTTPS conversion on a site that already had a “cheat” way of doing HTTPS through a plugin or such. There are different pre-checks that need to be done and slight difference in the order of steps to take at the beginning too.

Then I got all of the Cloudflare tutorials updated, plus a few new ones. 

Cloudflare makes about 20 changes a year. Some of those are brand new features to help keep your site secure and speedy. But this year they also totally reworked the interface. 

So, even though I constantly keep those tutorials updated with notes and screenshots, it was time to remake videos and all new screenshots for several of the tutorials, as too much has changed with some of the areas that need to be configured. 

This week I’m working on a few more updates due to changed interfaces on other testing platforms that webmasters need.

And then I’ll be jumping into some super deep checks with our UpdraftPlus and AS3 setup, as both have made significant changes, especially AS3 for our file storage. That’s not only to their interface, but to the settings as well.

And this is why you need to get a site audit checkup every 12-18 months too. So much changes.

DIY SEO Jump Start Begins in January

Next week I’ll be putting together our Jump Start checks for the DIY SEO course. These are one thing a day to check to quickly ensure your foundation is rock solid, as things change all the time with the Yoast SEO settings and features, as well as with Google Search Console.

We’ll start these checks the 2nd week in January, I believe, and then we’ll be ready for our first live workshop on Technical SEO. And I’ve got more checks for you this year, as some things have changed with not only Google, but Chrome too.

You’ll definitely want to know what I’ve seen in HTTPS conversions since the new Chrome updates that started in November.

Plus this year we’ll be getting our sites on Bing.

In 2019, more folks started boycotting all Google products due to perceived privacy invasion. 

And that means Bing is getting more search hits.

And some of my clients are reporting more traffic and conversions from Bing too.

So, we definitely want to get in on that!!!!!

If you’ve been in the course for a while, there will definitely be plenty of new things for you to check in 2020!!

Time is Running Out on the Holiday Deals

All BlogAid courses are still on sale, but the deals for them end Jan 5th.

And, time is really running out for you to book your site audit and get $20 off. That ends Dec 31.

You don’t pay until after the audit and right now I’m booking well into February for them.

So definitely get your request in now!!!

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

Security Tips

Continued Uptick in Spam

I’ve been talking all month about the increase in bad bot pulses that I’ve been monitoring all fall.

And I continue to see more reports of folks getting hit with excessive spam comments and hits to their sites in general, plus more spam via their contact forms.

While it’s good to have a great spam comment filter plugin, like Antispam Bee, and then reCaptcha on your contact form, it’s even better to have superior security that kicks those bots to the curb before they ever reach your hosting account.

That’s just one of the benefits of using Cloudflare when it is properly configured to kick the most bots.

Behemoth security plugins kick things only after it hits your site.

And that chews up more of your hosting resources that should be reserved for your good human visitors. If the attack is big enough, it could even send you into hosting overages.

Not to mention how much all of that extra activity slows down your page load speed.

Security and performance go hand in hand.

And that’s just one more reason to come in for an audit, or a checkup, and ensure your security is up to date at both your host and at Cloudflare.

Content Marketing Tips

I was Banned from the Scroll Saw For Beginners, Woodwork, Forum & Projects Facebook Group

Well, I finally get why Taylor Swift’s songs are so popular. 

And I’m taking a tip from her. You break up with me, I’ll write a post about you.

All Pinterest users, you’ll definitely want to read this post.

And honestly, everybody should read this post and do a mindset check about how you use the internet.

WordPress Tips

WordPress 5.3.2 Released

This is an auto update that rolled out just a few days after the 5.3.1 release with even more bug fixes. 

And hopefully this got the last of them.

If you’re still seeing any issues with your site after this update, leave us a comment and let us know.

How to Update to WordPress 5.3

If you haven’t made the jump to 5.3 yet, be sure to read my post for how to do it, as the order is slightly different this time.

That’s especially true of you were using the Gutenberg plugin.

SEO Tips

Checkboxes in GSC Reports

One of the confusing things in the reports you see in Google Search Console is that it has four elements it can add to your graph. And they are cumulative.

It wasn’t really intuitive to figure out how to just see one element of data and turn off the rest.

Well, they addressed that and added checkboxes to the data element title boxes.

So, now it’s a little clearer which ones are on or off.

Look for those the next time you’re checking your reports, which is at least monthly, I hope.

I ran a challenge in the DIY SEO course last year that sent reminders to peeps in our private Facebook group to go check their reports weekly. Everyone seemed to like that, so we’ll be doing it again this year.

And several folks reported that it really helped them understand what content was doing well in search, and which ones they needed to tweak a bit too.

Cloudflare Tips

Authenticated Origin Pulls Email

If you get an email from Cloudflare about Authenticated Origin Pulls, then follow this advice.

If you have a paid SSL certificate issued at your host, then you will need to follow the instructions they give for updating everything.

But, if you are using a free SSL certificate, like Let’s Encrypt, then you need to turn off this setting in Cloudflare.

• Go to the SSL/TLS tool at the top.
• Then click the Origin Server tab just below it.
• And turn off Authenticated Origin Pulls

Wrap Up

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

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