Tips Tuesday – Interworx Tutorials, Video SEO Guidelines, UpdraftPlus Issues

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• New Interworx tutorials are live in the Webmaster Training course
• Recipe Video SEO tutorials are almost complete
• How to get faster video and post production
• Holiday sales are coming soon and where to get first notification
• A recap on my first meeting with the new WP Performance team
• UpdraftPlus is still having issues for some folks
• Fantastic updates to WP Fastest Cache
• Super updates to CleanTalk Antispam
• A first real look at Full Site Editing
• What Google’s no-ad subscription survey may mean we’ll see in search
• How Google overcounted mobile page experience for 4 months
• When the new Google Page Experience will come to desktop
• Why Twitter previews for Instagram links is so important
• What’s in the updated Google Video SEO Guideline
• Why you may need a dedicated page for video
• Why the new YouTube Shorts Report is so exciting
• Why livestream shopping for Instagram is so important
• TikTok funny for bloggers

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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. And our BB Hub is a private member site and Facebook group for my site audit clients that has lots of extra perks and support.

BlogAid Happenings

Wowee! It has been a productive week around here with lots of new goodies and info for you!

New Interworx Tutorials are live

I’m delighted to share that a new set of tutorials for the Interworx control panel have been released in the Webmaster Training course!!

Interworx is the preferred control panel for VPS accounts, especially on Iridium Hosting, as it is setup properly there, which I can’t say about all hosts. 

And, if you run multiple sites, you can save money because you can have as many control panels as you need with Interworx rather than paying extra to get multiple cPanel control panels.

More than anything, I’m delighted to be moving away from so many cPanel headaches for my bigger clients and for webmasters who offer hosting and maintenance for their clients, and yet still have all of the functionality and security available for us.

Recipe Video SEO tutorials almost complete

I’m also delighted to share that all but one of the recipe video SEO tutorials are tested and written.

This week I’ll be testing the schema markup output on a post that has the Yoast Video SEO plugin, plus Mediavine video ads so we know what happens with that combo.

And then I’ll start recording all of the tutorials and upload them to the Video SEO Booster course, and that will complete it.

I also have more Video SEO news that I’ll tell you about in the Video Tips section.

Faster Video and Post Production

One of the things I cover in the Video SEO Booster course is storyboarding in ways that help you produce both your video and post faster.

I’m taking far less still shots during builds for Heartwood Art and instead I’m using still frames from the videos.

And, since I can only work in the shop for a couple of hours at a time, I’ve taken to writing that part of the post and at least choosing the videos and/or stills I want to use for the post right after.

That helps me make notes of important aspects of the build while they are fresh on my mind too.

I’ve basically got a template way of laying out the build info and I go ahead and start on that right away too, so it’s done by the time I finish my notes.

Plus, this gives me the opportunity to coordinate my post SEO with my YouTube SEO by making headings for the post that will serve as Chapters in YouTube.

And the more I do this, the faster I get at the whole thing, so I know the process I’m teaching you works.

And because I try to learn something new with every build, I’ve been making 2 posts at a time and cross promoting them.

Last time that was a new dowel jig I built so I could make a tower shoe rack.

This time it is a new aged wood technique that I’m using on a bookshelf.

And, I’ve been recording on my phone as I do parts of the process and sharing that on the Heartwood Art Instagram profile, as well as its Facebook page, and that has allowed me to have all manner of little clips to also share in woodworking groups that promote discussion and engagement. In fact, those groups have a lot to do with how fast my Heartwood Art YouTube channel has gained so many subscribers this year.

And I would have put out more posts this year, but what slowed me down from doing more builds was the delay in starting them due to the price of lumber. I’ll be closing up the shop in about a month, so no more big builds until spring. But, I’ve got other screencast tutorials to make over the winter, plus drawing up plans for when I can open the shop again.

Holiday Sales Coming Soon

BlogAid News subscribers will be the first to know when the new holiday sales post goes live.

And that will be soon, so be sure you are subscribed.

FYI, if you are in the BB Hub, or any BlogAid course, be sure to check your member dashboard for your standing discounts that are available all year long.

Site Services Update

As you know, I’ve pulled back to my normal client load through the end of the year, so we’re bringing on a new project as one closes.

We are on track for folks I guesstimated would be onboarding in November.

And new project requests are in the Feb/March range for starting.

Meeting with WP Performance Team Today

Last week the new WP Performance team had its first meeting. Out of the 21 topics they suggested we look into, 4 came to the top as having the most interest.

I’m in all 4, plus 2 more that we’ll get to down the road.

We’re meeting again today and will likely splinter off into 4 groups to tackle each one of these issues. 

Me and a couple of other folks suggested that setting testing standards and insuring everyone was on the same page with reading results and such should be the highest priority for the group. We’ll see how that plays out this week.

I’ll keep you posted on progress.

And as you’ll hear in the Plugin Tips section, I already work with devs to improve their wares for us all. So it will be good to be part of the WP team that is testing themes and plugins for speed too. However, that topic is not one of the top 4 we’ll be starting with.

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

Plugin Tips

UpdraftPlus Issues Update

It looks like the latest version of the paid plugin of 2.16.63.25 has fixed most everyone’s backup issues, but not everybody’s.

And we did see more variety in the backup issues than just whatever was fixed in the plugin itself, and that’s why it is super important to read the error log.

One client was running out of disk space. You can’t be much over 50% of disk space usage if you want to have room for the temp backup files to make.

And another client had all of her connections to UDP and AS3 knocked out. That one was rare, but was the source of the issue, as the backup could not make the AS3 storage connection.

I don’t have a ton of images on BlogAid, but that “failure to progress” issue finally hit that site. The rest of my sites never encountered the issue. And the latest update to the plugin did not fix the issue on BlogAid and a few other folks. So, I’m still digging into what the issue is on just that one site.

If you are a site audit client, please report in our BB Hub Facebook group if you are still seeing issues, and what your error message is. Look for the latest running post we have for reporting.

WP Fastest Cache now natively supporting some JS code

The latest WP Fastest Cache update includes the following:

• exclude js source of ConvertKit.com for render blocking js
• exclude js for render blocking js if source data-cfasync=“false”
• refactoring of lazy load for background images

I asked the dev, Emre about the ConvertKit JS exclusions and whether we needed to manually do that anymore. We don’t. He made that update just for me and my peeps. So I will be removing that from the WP Fastest Cache Settings tutorial soon.

And if you have used that exclusion, it’s okay to keep it. You just don’t have to use it for future insertions of it.

The exclude js for cfasync is to keep Cloudflare from deferring critical JavaScript too, so that’s helpful.

CleanTalk update suggestions implemented

As y’all know, I’ve been testing the CleanTalk anti-spam plugin for several months now.

One of my concerns about recommending it to folks who have multiple sites is that the install process is not very clear about the email that will be associated with the CleanTalk account.

As it stood when I installed the plugin on my 5 sites, it auto picked up the WP admin email for each site. And I have a different admin email on some of them than the one I used for my CleanTalk account.

It then auto created a new CleanTalk account with that other email. And that was a confusing mess to figure out.

I made suggestions about how to do the license verification differently and it looks like they have made a change to it in the latest version.

Here are some of the recent updates

• Added the functionality of changing the mail when receiving the key during the initial installation.
• Custom admin email. Added minified js and css files
• Validate api key before save settings for new accounts

They’ve made a slew of other updates too, and let’s hope this helps the plugin be less buggy, which is my other concern with it still. I want to go a few more months before I consider recommending it widely to my peeps, even though most all of my webmasters who do maintenance for their client sites have been using it for years.

WordPress Tips

First look at Full Site Editing

One of our favorite Genesis theme designers, Marcy Diaz, has flipped her Amethyst Website Design site over to a Full Site Editing (FSE) theme.

She is still in process of creating it and it is not ready for prime time fully yet as she is having to use the Gutenberg plugin to get access now to some functions that will hopefully be available in the WP 5.9 release coming up in mid December.

But, she has written a nice post about her adventures with FSE that gives us a lot of insight into what’s coming.

SEO Tips

Google survey for no-ad premium search

They did it with YouTube and now Google is doing it for Search.

Google just published a survey asking folks if they would like an ad-free Search experience for a paid subscription.

YouTube has been offering an ad-free subscription service for some time. And in the last year or so they radically increased the number of ads, and the number of videos they show them on, and that’s regardless of whether your YT channel is in the Partner Program or not, meaning that YT gets 100% of the revenue for those ads if you are not in the Partner Program.

Depending on what you search, all of page 1 on Google could already show up as entirely ads. And this makes me wonder what will happen if they increase the number of ads just like they did on YT.

The reasons they can get away with it on YT is because there’s really nothing else like it.

But, there are plenty of other search engines, like Bing. And this makes we wonder if folks will just change to that and leave Google search.

My BB Hub members, as well as my DIY SEO course members say they are already getting more traffic from Bing and even Duck Duck Go.

So, we’ll see how this plays out.

Google overcounted mobile page experience for 4 months

And speaking of your site metrics, last week Google told us that for a whole 4 months they overcounted your mobile Page Experience data.

They say accurate data started appearing about on Nov 1st.

GSC has been inaccurate all year and I don’t think we can trust it as a way to see what’s going on with our ranking, much less other metrics like Page Experience, which has always fluctuated wildly week to week and month to month.

Google Page Experience coming to desktop

And, speaking of Page Experience, so far Google has only been calculating for your mobile load.

In Feb 2022, Google will start calculating Page Experience for the desktop version of your site.

Now, keep in mind that the load order is different between the two.

That’s exactly why I have always tested both in site audits.

Plus, I give you the real-world results of your site, just like the metrics Google actually uses for Page Experience, and those are not what you see in a PageSpeed Insights test either.

Twitter previews available for Instagram links

Hey, this is pretty cool.

And you may be wondering why I put it in the SEO Tips section.

Google crawls Twitter – that’s why.

Even if you don’t get a lot of traffic from Twitter, you need to be publishing your latest post there as Google will see it. 

And maybe start recycling old posts or seasonal posts there too.

I don’t do much for BlogAid on IG yet, and I just play with IG for Heartwood Art. 

But this definitely changes the SEO picture of it, and I’m going to make plans accordingly and hope you do too.

Video SEO Tips

Google Video SEO Guidelines updated

SEO Roundtable has a nice post with highlights of what is in the Video SEO Guideline.

There’s nothing much new in it, just minor updates and more help documentation.

Just know that everything in that Guideline, and more, is what I teach in the Video SEO Booster course.

And I go way deeper into explaining it clearly than Google does. Plus, I give you examples.

Dedicated video page

One of the items that did change in the Video SEO Guideline was that your video must be the most prominent feature and at the top of the page.

I’ve been mentioning in Tips Tuesday for a while now that Google is having difficulty parsing our schema markup when it comes to video.

And if you have other special markup on the page for something like a recipe, it could confuse Google even more.

Basically, too much stuff going on with the page confuses Google and they are not clear what you are trying to rank the page for.

THIS is why I’ve been doing so much testing in the Video SEO Booster course, including my recent super deep dive into recipe schema, plus video ads, as both of them have schema markup around them too.

This is one of those things where less is more. And trying to throw too much on a single blog post can actually hurt your SEO.

YouTube Shorts Report

This is a great addition.

The new Shorts Report:

“highlights popular users, trends, and creation notes to help in your Shorts process. The October version of the Shorts Report includes notes on how to maximize Shorts engagement, using audio in your clips, and how to build an audience with the option.”

Ecomm Tips

Instagram launches livestream shopping for the holidays

Looks like all of the social media platforms are becoming shopping malls these days.

And video streaming is huge on all of them too.

IG is getting in on the trends with their new livestream shopping that’s just in time for the holidays.

You’ll find it in the Shop tab.

I’m not sure that many of my clients can get in on this directly.

But, take it as another sign that the culture is changing on social media and doing videos and promoting your own products is the way everything is going.

I’m brainstorming ideas for how I can best use video and livestreaming for BlogAid. And the product I’ll be selling is my extensive knowledge.

TikTok Funny

Need a good laugh today? Read this.

I watched a livestream on TikTok the other night where a guy brought up the site of a well established foodie blogger who is a stay at home mom with chocolate cake recipes featured on her home page.

He pointed out one Google AdSense ad on her site.

Then he went to SimilarWeb to bring up her site stats. She has 1.08M hits/mo and 1.44 page views per session.

Then he went to AdSense to see how much an ad was worth in the Food niche, did a little quick math, and told folks she was making $1.25 million a year from that ad.

All folks had to do was buy his $7 ebook to learn how to do it too.

Were it that easy, right?

Wrap Up

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

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