Tips Tuesday – MailerLite Migration, Helpful Content Update, AI Plugin Tests

Hello happy site owner!

Tips this week include:

• A look behind the scenes of a week at BlogAid
• Bad bot investigations
• New Cloudflare settings
• New MailerLite Migration service coming soon
• When to get help with DNS record changes
• Why you need to get a solid SEO foundation first
• How I make money answering questions
• Do you need a new site or a rebrand or something else?
• How much time it takes to read the site-related news
• What’s up with the big HTTP2 Rapid Reset vulnerability
• Why you need to get serious about protecting your Facebook account
• Will Google succeed in replacing passwords with passkeys?
• A guide to the Helpful Content Update
• My advice about SEO tips right now
• APIs are not as secure as we thought
• Why we need to close WP REST API endpoints
• Update on my AI plugins testing
• The reason you have to pay for AI
• The all in one AI plugins I’m testing
• 2 kinds of resource usage with AI plugins
• Trading convenience for security and hosting costs

What a week! 

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at BlogAid each week?

Here’s what it looked like this past week.

Emails, Investigations, and Tutorials Galore

I had emails flying out to all of my clients and course members like crazy to keep them on top of all the news and new tutorials for new things to do.

Here are just a few of the emails and investigations:

Bad Bots

• Investigated and added a new SEO agency bot to our Bad SEO Bot list at Cloudflare, as it is going bonkers crawling our sites, chewing up our resources, and giving our info to competitors to outrank us.
• Investigated another bot that is on the rise, but it is a generic bot that is also used by some reputable entities that we do want to crawl our sites, so it can’t be blocked – yet. The fact is, AI models are going to buy this kind of info from other entities who crawl our sites in ways we can’t block. Our content is going to end up in the AI models at some point. The best we can hope for is to get cited/credited as the source.

Cloudflare

• Updated Webmaster Training members with full run-through of all current Cloudflare settings
• Created and sent site audit Hub members a tutorial for updating 2 HTTPS settings in Cloudflare to help reduce host resource usage for non-canonical redirects
• Investigated a change at Cloudflare that temporarily broke the comment verification in Turnstile
• Investigated 2 new changes at Cloudflare that are specifically for logged in users and a new security feature

MailerLite Migration

• Met/communicated with 3 site audit Hub volunteers to dig through the upcoming MailerLite migration from Classic to the New MailerLite.
• Met with our vendor who does all email setups to coordinate the DNS record changes at the host and at Cloudflare.
• Put together outline of a new service that I’ll be offering to do live sessions to walk clients through the migration and DNS changes.

About the DNS Records

Keep in mind that if your DNS records are setup properly for your email client (Workspace, Zoho, etc.) and your email list service (MailerLite, Mailchimp, etc.) some of them are combined. Plus, MailerLite used a TXT record for the DKIM and is now switching to a CNAME record.

And, there may be DNS records for landing pages and such too.

So, this is not something clients should be trying to do on their own.

The MailerLite tutorial most certainly does not tell you everything you need to know about that either.

And there are so many variations that I can’t even make tutorials for my clients. I’d have to make 8-10 of them, and that would just lead to more confusion.

Hence the need to offer it as a live session service where I walk folks through the multiple parts of the migration on their end, and then I do the DNS records update at the host and at Cloudflare.

I will only be offering this service to my Hub members and to my Webmasters for their clients. This will not be available to the general public because it’s highly likely that most site owners don’t have their DNS records set up right to begin with. And I’m not going to take on that mess.

SEO Consults

Get a Solid SEO Foundation

I met with a BlogAid newcomer who has a client that he’s trying to get better SEO for his site.

His client is an expert in a very specific topic and has books and training material galore. He’s just not getting seen in Google. Most all of his connections and sales are from the forums he’s in for that topic where he is constantly answering questions.

We found that his SEO foundation is not solid on his site, so he got into the DIY SEO course to take care of that.

And, he’s going to start writing blog posts and maybe do videos on the very questions that he answers in those forums.

Even though those same answers are in his books and training materials, they are hidden from Google and from the larger set of eyes of folks searching for that info.

How I Make Money Answering Questions

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got this tip.

New Site or Rebrand

I have a long-time client who started a podcast.

And she contacted me to setup a new site for it.

Wait, what?

Why not include it on the site she already has, which is selling a her current product like cra cra?

Well, because the name of the podcast is different. And she wants it under that domain name on a new site.

Plus, she wanted to move over a whole slew of posts from the main site to the new one.

Okay, hold up a minute, we needed to chat.

There are very serious SEO consequences to doing something like that.

And a rebrand of the original site might be better, as the new domain name is PERFECT!

And the podcast is bringing folks in like cra cra.

We discussed all of her options, the caveats of each, and made a plan for the solution that would yield the least SEO impact and the highest possible conversion. And it wasn’t a new site or a rebrand.

Reading the News

I spend at least 15 hours a week reading site ownership related news.

To respect your time, what you see in Tips Tuesday is a fraction of what I investigate because I only want to deliver what you need to be aware of right this minute, or what we need to prepare for down the road.

The Tips you see here is the shortest summary with the best links I can find for more reading.

Security Tips

HTTP2 Rapid Reset Vulnerability

This is a VERY serious threat that has been impacting the entire internet since August.

The link above is a post from the official government office of CISA (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency).

I strongly suggest you read that article. It’s short, but it has a lot of links. I read them all.

Patches are going into place, but that takes time to roll out globally, and there is no guarantee that all countries will do it.

As for my site audit clients, you have been protected from this since the day we started working together. For some folks that has been over a decade.

The security combos I have in place on your site work together to protect your site, and the host server your on, from these types of attacks.

If you’re not one of my clients, you may want to contact your host to see what they are doing about it.

Protect Your Facebook Account

Scams on FB have reached epidemic proportions. 

And now they are pouring over to Instagram too.

I would imagine Threads is next.

Meta isn’t doing much, if anything about this.

Yet folks are losing their accounts in droves.

It’s up to us to protect our own accounts, and to not fall for the scams.

Don’t click links in emails that you get which look like official emails from a vendor – any vendor.

Log into that platform and look for messages there.

And do the other things called out in the article above too.

Passkeys Instead of Passwords

Google has started an initiative in earnest to encourage everyone to start using passkeys instead of passwords for all of their accounts.

A passkey is like the face recognition, or thumb/finger touch you have on your phone.

Google has decided that passkeys are even more secure than 2-factor authentication (2FA), as that code has to travel over the internet and/or through a router that could be compromised.

I’m wondering what this is going to mean for those of us who work mainly from desktop and/or work on client sites.

SEO Tips

Helpful Content Update Explained 

Want to know how the Helpful Content Update worked in combination with the other Google core updates that are already in place?

If your traffic just tanked because of it, I’m betting you do.

And I’m betting you’re wondering why some less authoritative posts are now ranking too.

There is a reason for it.

And you’ll find it in this very long, very deep look into what’s going on.

Fair warning and my advice about what’s in this article

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got this tip.

WordPress Tips

WordPress 6.4 RC1 is Near

The WP 6.4 Beta 3 rolled out last Tuesday.

I expect the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) may roll out today, or next week.

That’s when I’ll begin my deep dive into it and making a video tour of the new features.

The final release is expected on Nov 7.

WordPress AI Updates

My plans for the AI plugins got turned upside down this past week.

Here’s what I found with the 10 hours I spent on it.

APIs Are Not As Secure As We Thought

An API is an Application Programming Interface.

It connects one application to another through a special key and allows them talk to each other, even when they don’t talk in the same language.

It’s also encrypted.

That sounds secure, right?

Well, those parts are.

But the endpoints are another story.

Why We Need to Close WP REST API Endpoints

What I found in my research this week confirmed EXACTLY why I have to do this deep AI testing to ensure we keep our sites secure and cost effective.

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got this tip.

AI Plugins Test Update

ALL of the plugins I planned to test only have AI in their paid versions.

Well, I’m certainly not going to blow the budget on that, especially since we won’t even be using most of them.

However, I’ll be putting all those hours of reading up on them to good use with reports on what each offers and whether it’s worth it or not.

And I’ll be asking the devs to supply a plugin license so I can test them.

If they don’t, and maybe even if they do, I’ll be quizzing them HARD on how they connect their API to WP and whether the other end also connects to OpenAI, as most do.

The Reason You Have to Pay for AI, and My Concerns

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got this tip.

The All in One AI Plugins I Will Be Testing Instead

There is a way around the man-in-the-middle security issue mentioned above.

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got this tip.

Two Kinds of Resource Usage with AI Plugins

There are 2 types of usage that I have to test with any AI writing plugins.

And 1 of them can cause a serious overage of resources with your hosting package, to the point that your site gets limited or shut down.

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got this tip.

Trading Convenience for Security and Hosting Costs

You know as well as I do that most site owners are going to trade a bit of convenience for both security and resource usage – right up until their sites get hacked or until their sites get limited or shut down due to hosting overages, and they don’t want to pay more for a bigger hosting package.

And that’s exactly what is about to happen.

I want to help us avoid that.

And that’s why I HAVE to do this deep AI plugin and theme testing.

Site Services Update

And of course, I spent several hours this past week doing site audit client annual checkups.

Fortunately those are fast and cheap and we’re usually done in 3-4 days, at most.

The wait list is running about 1 week out right now. 

So if you have an audit checkup due in November, or want another site service done prior to the holidays starting, now is the time to get that request in.

December is a super heavy month for audit checkups. And I expect the waitlist to go to 2-3 weeks for the month.

Tips Tuesday Prep

And of course, there is the actual creation of Tips Tuesday, and now the extra Tips Tuesday Plus post.

I save up my tips and links all through the week as I’m reading and researching.

I enjoy writing that over the weekend while out on the deck with Zak (my dog).

The full process takes 3-4 hours for writing, posting, emailing, and such. I do that on Monday afternoons.

More AI Tutorials and News

I spent the weekend checking out all of the new AI image tools and features that just rolled out from Adobe and DALL-E. I’m still making the tutorials for the AI Images for Profit membership on those.

Plus, I made about 10 new images to submit to Adobe Stock – boy, are those fun!

And I sent out the bi-weekly newsletter to AI Discover Hub followers.

That’s My Week, How Was Yours?

Like a said, LOTS going on this past week. 

And I had to do all of the updates that I suggest you do too, across multiple sites.

Maybe it will let up a bit this coming week for us.

But you know I’ll keep you posted as things roll through, if needed.

Yes, I Have Down Time

Zak is getting older and can’t see as well as he used to. That’s giving him a confidence issue with jumping up on the couch or bed or such. And he can’t jump as high as needed sometimes too. The slick, hardwood floors don’t help with this issue either.

So, I’ve been drawing up plans for a ramp or steps or such to build for him.

I’m hankering like crazy to get back into my woodshop and get some sawdust glitter flying, especially now that yard work is slowing down and I have more time for it.

Daydreaming while I figure out how to make it is the funniest part for me.