Tips Tuesday – Live SEO Workshops, Google Looses Search Market Share 

Tips this week include:

• 3 live workshops for the DIY SEO course this month
• Reddit dropping in Search fast
• Google drops Search market share for the first time in 10 years
• Fix for the UpdraftPlus / Amazon S3 Issue
• Kadence FSE theme survey
• Why the WP community is splitting
• What comes next for WP
• How much money is on the line for us WP bloggers
• Why we need to keep our eyes on the prize

BlogAid Happenings

I’ve been buried in client work this past week – not only the regular audits and such, but also a LOT of fix-it sessions. And then the whole UpdraftPlus widespread issue – but that has been resolved, see below for more on that.

I know my site audit Hub clients are thrilled to have a trusted place to turn when something odd pops up – and they don’t have unexpected payouts for support either. It’s all covered in the $97/year Hub membership.

I’m still carrying about 3x more client work than usual this week, but a bunch of projects are coming to their end, so things should lighten up for the rest of the month – and good thing too! I’ve got all kinds of SEO and marketing things to get to.

SEO Tips

3 Live Workshops in the DIY SEO Course

We HAVE to start looking for eyeballs in other places besides Google Search now.

But all of these other platforms are search engines too, and they have their own SEO.

So, we’re kicking off the new year with 3 brand new live sessions in the DIY SEO course starting Jan 16 to cover SEO beyond Google.

• SEO in 2025 – with my predictions and SEO on other platforms we need to try
• Pinterest – with special guest speaker
• Blogging on Medium – with tips and tricks that make easy and get more eyeballs

Now is a GREAT time to get into the course.

Just contact me through the site, or reply to this email for a discount so insanely low that I’m not even making it public.

It’s not too late to get a discount to the course that is so insanely low that I’m not even making it public. Just contact me and join us.

This discount ends Jan 15 – the day prior to the first live workshop.

Reddit Dropping in Search Fast

In early 2024, Google made a deal with Reddit to scan their content to train the Google AI LLM. That angered a LOT of Reddit folks, and some made their sub-Reddits unavailable to Google for crawling.

But, the trade-off was that Google showed a LOT of Reddit posts on page 1 of Search.

Well, that’s over.

Reddit is dropping fast in Search results.

Guess what’s taking its place? Yep, Google AI summaries.

So, maybe Google has all it needs from Reddit’s content now, and they don’t feel the need to promote them any more than they promote our blog posts in Search.

I was going to do a new workshop in the DIY SEO course for making use of Reddit. And we still may, as it is still a good place to get more eyeballs by participating in community discussions. 

But, most Reddits are super against self-promotion, so you can’t just do hit-and-run broadcasting of links there, like other platforms. They really do want genuine community participation and discussion.

So, I may still do that workshop, but I think I’ll put it off until later this spring as we have plenty of other places to share links directly to our content and products to get involved in first.

Google Dropped Search Market Share

I guess Google thought they were going to get away with killing off independent blogs in search.

The backlash is starting to show.

Search Engine Land just reported that Google’s search market share has dropped below 90% for the first time since 2015.

Considering it stayed below 90% for 3 months, that indicates a trend. More importantly, those 3 months were the height of the holiday sales season.

In the U.S. search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Duck Duck Go picked up some shares.

What does this mean for us? 

Nothing yet.

But this, and the loss of revenue will be the ONLY things that get Google’s attention that they may not be headed in the right direction with their changes.

Plugin Tips

Fix for UpdraftPlus with Amazon S3 Storage Issue

AS3 made a change with their API or such for some regions of their cloud storage, and that halted our UpdraftPlus backup files from being stored there.

It seems the issue started on Jan 7, and UDP issued a fix for it on Jan 11.

See this tutorial for Fix for UpdraftPlus with Amazon S3 Storage Issue for how to test your connection, how to fix it, and when to delete any backups that were not sent to AS3 storage.

I want to thank everyone who reported this issue to UpdraftPlus. I’m positive that helped escalate the fix.

NOTE: The release with this fix should have auto updated for you, if you have that turned on (all of my clients do). So, you may only want to do the test to ensure your connection is good.

And then see how to delete the backup that may have been stored only on your hosting.

FYI, I sent info to all BlogAid News subscribers about this problem when it started, as well as the day the fix was available. Be sure you are subscribed (if you’re getting this Tips Tuesday, you are subscribed already.)

Webmaster Tips

Kadence FSE Theme Survey

The nice folks at Kadence themes want to know what designers think of FSE themes in this survey.

FSE stands for Full Site Editor (or Editing).

And fully compliant FSE themes allow special Gutenberg blocks in places like the header, sidebar, and footer.

This survey is really for designers, not us lay folks, as they want to know what FSE themes you’ve worked with and what they are missing that you’d like to see included in FSE Kadence themes, if they develop them.

The fact is, WordPress pushed FSE themes out several years ago, but they never caught on.

And I suspect that big theme makers, like Genesis, Astra, Kadence, and others have zero desire to use them as all of them have a Pro product with their proprietary way of easily editing these theme areas.

So, they would actually lose money if they supplied a fully compliant FSE theme and let folks use the native WP blocks that are made for these other areas.

It will be interesting to see the survey results. But I suspect that Kadence Pro themes aren’t going away anytime soon. 

WordPress Tips

The WP Community is Splitting

When Matt started all of the WP drama in late 2024, I made a decision to not cover it as just blow-by-blow news, and to instead only report what may impact us.

I’m also very sorry that I’ve had to read as much about it as I have, just to get to that news that may impact us.

But, I think it is super important at this point that you are fully aware of what’s happening, because there is no way the latest actions by Matt won’t impact the entire WP ecosystem now.

The split in the WP community started in 2019 with Matt forcing the release of Gutenberg well before it was ready.

That caused many devs to create a fork of WP called ClassicPress. They basically incorporate all new WP code changes except those that are Gutenberg related.

They also had to create forked versions of some plugins to get them to run on ClassicPress.

As far as I know, the only part of the WP ecosystem this impacted were devs that worked on more enterprise, or corporate level sites. And since that is not us, I really haven’t talked about it much.

But this new fight with WP Engine is a whole other thing, as are Matt’s antics since it started.

And you need to know what’s happening.

Following is not a blow-by-blow. It’s only a summary of the events that I think tell the story so you can see what I’m concerned about for us – and maybe what’s coming.

• At Wordcamp 2024’s State of Word, Matt sprung his fight with WP Engine (WPE) on everyone by surprise. He wants them to pay $35 million in copyright infringement for using the WP logo as a way to punish them for not donating to the 5 for 5 program, where corporations sponsor devs to work on WP. WPE is owned by a private equity firm and has made millions by saying they specialize in WP hosting, yet give little back to the WP community.
• When WPE refused to pay, Matt cut off WPE from the WP.org dev access so that they could no longer update the plugins they had listed there – that included the extremely popular ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) plugin that many business/corporate sites use.
• Due to all of the negative feedback, Matt doubled down on the fact that he owns WP software and WP.org, including all of the free plugin and theme repositories, and that Automattic was his for-profit business to run any way he saw fit – including all of the volunteer devs who work there. For any paid staff that disagreed with him, he offered a 6-month severance to leave – and 153 folks walked, leaving them short on staff.
• Then Matt took over the free ACF plugin, stating it was for security reasons, forked it under another name, but kept it on the same plugin listing with reviews and install numbers and such.
• Matt changed the WP.org login, where devs need access to update their plugins, with a checkbox to confirm that they are in no way associated with WPE.
• The dev community lost their minds with this type of hostile plugin takeover and login access change. Many long-time contributors updated their WP.org profile to say that they are no longer associated with offering free dev services to a for-profit entity.
• Several companies looked into financing other repositories for WP.org plugins and themes. That might relieve the bottleneck of massive data delivery, but they would just be mirrors. It doesn’t really alleviate the single ownership problem. Nor do we need a bunch of repositories with different plugin versions and stats. So, this is not a solution.
• There is a Code of Conduct for WP, that Matt wrote. And when some folks started publicly bashing about all of these antics, Matt threatened one of them privately – like taking over his plugin – breaking that Code of Conduct. When this came to light, that’s when the extreme gaslighting by Matt started to take place. He created this mess and then started playing the victim and blaming others.
• WPE took Matt to court to get a stay on lack of access, and to return their plugin to them, until the copyright issue could be sorted out. WPE won that battle.
• Once all of the above drama died down, Matt made a post asking what new drama he should create for 2025 – this is just one of many “crazy” sounding posts he has made since all of this started.
• Multiple members of the community started asking for Matt to resign and/or for a board to be created so that Matt had someone to answer to and could no longer make unilateral decisions that would negatively impact the entire WP ecosystem.
• Some members even went so far as to draft an open letter of his voluntary resignation or formation of a board, but could not sign their names to it publicly for fear of significant financial or business loss retribution from Matt. They had the news entity that printed it verify their names as real instead. That’s just how scared folks are of this dictatorship, and that speaks volumes. So far that has gone nowhere, and Matt has said he will never step away – he can’t, he owns it all.
• Matt published that Automattic would only contribute as much dev time to WP as WPE had, including time on security issues. This was an effort to get folks to pressure WPE to give in and pay up. It’s not working. And the whole WP community is going to suffer from paid folks only putting in 45 hours of dev time.
• Some long-time contributors and leaders in the WP community decided to speak out publicly about forking WP, just as the ClassPress folks had done. In his latest petty move, Matt has decided to remove the WP.org profiles for everyone who publicly backed this idea. (There’s more in this post on Matt’s thoughts about the fork, along with more petty jabs.) NOTE: Some of those folks are trying to clarify that they didn’t talk about a fork as much as spearheading the need to change the internal governing structure of WP. But I have seen them speak of a fork.
• Matt has decided to bring the next WP 6.8 release strictly in-house, meaning no sponsored devs, only ones he pays through Automattic. The scope will be smaller. That’s good and bad. I’m all for smaller scopes on these releases. But let’s hope that they are working on things we actually need – like super old bug tickets, not just some frilly new Gutenberg thing.
• Due to all of Matt’s shenanigans, the leader of the Sustainability Team resigned. My guess is that Matt wasn’t even aware that the team existed, as they have been struggling to get support. So, Matt just shut it down altogether.

What Comes Next?

Here’s what I think about all of this, and what might come of it. 

At this time, THE people that I most respect in the WP community have either publicly stated they have stopped contributing to it, or have been “banned” in some way. This includes WP devs, plugin devs, and theme designers/devs that I have known and followed for 20 years.

The WP community as we know it cannot survive this split, as it isn’t just about one aspect of the code, like the Gutenberg split was. And no one can continue to live in fear of the financial loss that may come from speaking out about Matt’s antics. (I think this is the only reason we have not heard more backlash.) Plus, NOBODY can financially survive continued instability from Matt.

I believe WP has to be forked, and a new community with a board of directors has to be established, as the only way to get out from under Matt’s ownership of so much of the critically important infrastructure.

I have no idea if this will actually happen, or how long it will take, or what it will look like if it does happen. I do know that it will take a LOT of financial backing. (Matt suggested they call on WPE for that.) But there are other entities lined up to help, I just don’t know what financial arrangements they are expecting, as the new fork should be not-for-profit.

And I think Matt is about to find out what it is like to run a company without 100s of hours a week in free labor due to so many devs no longer contributing, as they are sick of working for free to make his for-profit enterprises run.

The one ray of hope that I have is that I believe THE best people, both in leadership and dev skills, will come over to a new version, should that happen. And I believe more will follow if things are fair and equitable, and there isn’t a lot of infighting for power or direction, which is all too often the case when you get a room full of devs together, as most of them think they know better than anyone else in the room. (That is not just my opinion, it is based on my experience when volunteering in WP dev groups – and many of y’all know the backstory on that.)

Serious Money is On the Line

Here’s the bottom line.

I make the bulk of my income with WordPress. So do you. So does Matt and Automattic. So do most all of these folks who have been banned and such.

So, I can’t see WP shutting down fully, meaning no access to plugin updates and such.

If a new fork happens, it will take time to ensure all themes and plugins can run on it, and that it remains stable – meaning that we will not be the first folks to jump there. And I would not expect to see a production release of it in less than a year.

In conclusion, you need to know why this fork may happen, why I will be keeping tabs on it, and why we may or may not move to it, or if it becomes a whole new animal that has far more modern code at its base. 

I have reached out to some of the folks who may be involved in this new fork and asked that they consider representation of small bloggers like us in their decision making to ensure that corporate-level devs are not the only ones getting what they need. 

After all, WP was originally started as a blogging platform, and it is still the best one for bloggers to use.

Plus, I represent $6-10 million/yr in earned revenue between the folks who are my direct clients and those in my Webmaster Training and their clients. That doesn’t include all the money these folks spend in the WP economy on hosting and plugins I recommend.

So, I’m not just speaking as a little blogger. I’m speaking as a blogger and trainer and web tech that has a big dog pack in this race.

I will continue to keep you posted on what is happening that directly affects us along the way, but I won’t be covering every petty thing that comes up.

Keep Eyes on the Prize

For now, let’s keep our focus on getting higher visibility in ways other than just Google SEO, and ways to make income from our extensive knowledge and content in the form of our own products, like digital downloads and courses. I think the WP drama should take a back seat to our efforts to Thrive in ‘25!