Tips Tuesday – IndexNow, Stencil Graphics, PHP 8 Errors , Redirects in Cloudflare

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• PHP 8 Error log tests are underway
• New tutorial for wildcard redirects in Cloudflare
• Why the co-founder of WP says it’s faster to design in Wix
• Yoast SEO fatal errors fixed in the latest release
• IndexNow – is it time to use it?
• Update on Product Review Pros/Cons schema markup and who can and can’t use it
• What is Topical Authority? And how do you get it?
• Create great graphics with Stencil – it’s a good Canva alternative

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BlogAid Village Happenings

PHP 8 Error Tests Underway

Most all of my clients and webmasters have upgraded to PHP 8.0 and all is working well with the front of their sites, or they have identified either themes or plugins that are not working and are making arrangements for that.

But, there could be things going on that you don’t know about too.

Last week I released tutorials for my BB Hub folks, who are my DIY site audit clients, as well as to my Webmaster Training folks on how to check their PHP error log to find those hidden issues.

And we definitely are finding things and reporting them in our respective Facebook groups. We’ve already found fixes for most of them and will likely be completely finished with all of this testing before the month is out.

And that’s way ahead of the November deadline when every host will switch to PHP 8.0 because all support for 7.4 has ended.

For the life of me, I can’t imagine why more news about this change is not being sent from hosts and posted all over the web, as every WP site owner needs to do this switch and testing early.

I’m so grateful you’re following me so you know what’s coming and can stay out of panic mode with it, and we can all get through this calmly together with the power of the village working for us.

BlogAid Course Happenings

Wildcard Redirects at Cloudflare Tutorial

BlogAid offers a rebranding service for folks who want to change their site to another domain name.

And I had been doing those redirects at the host.

But, a better way to do them is at Cloudflare.

So I made a tutorial for my Webmasters on how to do a wildcard redirect of the domain using a Page Rule.

The beauty of it is that it gets all combos of http(s) and www or non too.

And all of that redirect resource usage is on Cloudflare, not chewing up your resources or a cPanel at your host.

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

WordPress Tips

Mullenweg Says Desiging in Wix is Faster Than WP

Holy cow, y’all! This is funny and sad all at the same time.

WordPress decided to do a revamp of their home page.

And the redesign took weeks to finish.

Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WP, publicly complained about why it took so long to do with the block editor.

And he said the same thing could have been done on Wix or Squarespace in a day.

The complaint wasn’t with the block editor itself. It was with the team taking 33 days from concept to launch on a redesign of two super simple pages.

He said that was a poor use of the team’s time.

You can read all about, including the very public digs on Twitter, in the Search Engine Journal post I have linked above.

My take – this is what happens when you have a committee of volunteers working on a project instead of real leadership in a corporate flow structure.

And this is why all SaaS products beat WP. It’s also why every 3rd party theme and specialty block dev beats WP.

The point of this redesign was to showcase what WP and the block editor can do.

I think they proved the opposite. 

They showed why WP is so far behind every other builder, and how slow it is to do styling with the native blocks compared to using a specialty block plugin like those made by Astra or Kadence or even GenratePress.

ANY of my webmaster designers or clients who use Astra or Kadence could have whipped out those two pages in a matter of hours. That’s because they learned to do it in my Gutenberg Ninja course.

Like I said – this is both laughable and sad all at the same time. WP is its own worst enemy.

Plugin Tips

Yoast 19.5 Fatal Errors Has Been Fixed

If you updated to Yoast SEO 19.5 last week, you likely encountered a fatal error on your site.

The issue was reported to Yoast and they released 19.5.1 that same day.

So, check your version and ensure it is at least 19.5.1 before updating.

SEO Tips

IndexNow – Is It Time to Use It? 

Search Engine Land is reporting that URLs submitted by IndexNow are responsible for 7% of all clicks on the Bing search engine last month.

I have been opposed to using IndexNow because it pings for every new post/page you create or update and does not respect any settings for noindex, nofollow, noarchive.

So, you ping a search engine then when they come to crawl it, they could get blocked. That’s going to cause an error for them, and you can see it in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Team Yoast had the same bad reaction to it that I had, plus, they didn’t like the fact that it pinged all the search engines, except Google, one at a time. 

Google does not support IndexNow and has publicly stated that they have no plans to support it in the future, but that could change.

I was shocked a couple of months ago when Joost de Valk announced that he was now advocating including IndexNow in Yoast SEO Premium. Turns out that their only standing objection was the multiple pings.

IndexNow fixed that and has one API that pings all search engines at the same time.

So, if you want to use IndexNow and you have Yoast SEO Premium, you can turn it on, if you can deal with the errors of blocked crawls. I guess that’s just not a big concern for SEOs like it used to be, who knows.

If you use one of the other SEO plugins, they’ve had it available for some time, as does Cloudflare.

And I’ll be testing how to do it via Cloudflare instead of us getting the IndexNow plugin, and because most of my peeps do not use the paid version of Yoast, nor do I recommend using it.

There are 2 settings in Cloudflare to make this work well and that’s why I need to test it first.

I’ll be making tutorials for my BB Hub (site audit clients) and Webmasters once my tests are finished.

Update on Which Sites Can Use New Product Pros and Cons Structured Data

You may recall that I reported in last week’s Tips Tuesday that Google was now supporting the Pros and Cons schema markup.

And you may recall that I reported how much money you can make doing product reviews because Google is scrambling to find more folks to feature in Search for them.

Well, there appear to be some restrictions on who can use this new schema markup, and it’s good news for you!!!

Search Engine Journal reports that the schema is not allowed on:

• Merchant sites
• Customer reviews on product sites

That means you will not be competing with the big dogs for this!!!

I have to tell you, this has renewed my interest in doing product reviews on my Heartwood Art site, especially doing video reviews. I want to test the waters with it there.

And I definitely plan to do them for my “secret” project that I’m working on.

Hey, if something can get you to the top of page 1 of Google Search, I think it’s well worth looking into doing!!

What is Topical Authority?

One of the most powerful concepts we cover in my DIY SEO course is how to gain authority on topic.

And the centerpiece is building a content silo.

Go have a look at this post from Search Engine Journal where they explain what Topical Authority is and how it works.

Of course the biggest way to gain authority on topic is via backlinks, and posts like my WP Fastest Cache Settings has lots and lots of those, including from the dev’s own site.

But, that’s certainly not the only way, and there are a LOT of things you can do on your own site to gain authority too.

One of the ways they mention in this article is Content Clusters. This is akin to building a content silo.

I will also remind you of what I mentioned in last week’s Tips Tuesday about going for those zero volume search keywords. You can tie up the #1 Search position for authority with those too. I’m doing that on Heartwood Art where a couple of posts have held the top positions for the last 3 years and bring a lot of traffic to my site.

Image Tips

Create Graphics with Stencil

Are you bored with Canva? Or are you tired of your graphics looking just like the same templates everyone else is using?

Give Stencil a try.

It’s from NameCheap and they have a free version so you can play with it.

I saw several templates that were super eye-catching.

And if nothing else, it may give you some fresh ideas and inspire your creativity.

Wrap Up

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

Thanks for sharing this podcast and post with your blogging buddies, and for leaving comments and reviews too.

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Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.