Tips Tuesday – New in WP 6.4, SEO Change Order Matters, AI Executive Order

Welcome to the race for the holidays and end of the year deadlines!

It’s frenzy time and things have kicked into high gear here at BlogAid too.

Let’s dive right in.

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What’s New in WordPress 6.4

WP 6.4 is expected to start rolling out today.

There are some very important changes under the hood that are mostly good, but I do have concerns about a few that I listed in the post above.

The biggest one is the warning that you must be on at least PHP 8.1 at your host.

Actually, you needed to be on that for the WP 6.3 update too. And I took my peeps through that update back in late spring. We’ll likely be going up to PHP 8.2 this coming spring.

There are a few block editor changes and such too, but not enough to warrant making a video to show you, especially since I think you may only use one of them, which is the ability to now use background images on Group blocks.

We won’t be the first to update to this new version.

And because of all the under-the-hood changes, and the PHP compatibility, I’ll only be sending notification and special update instructions when I think it’s safe to do so to my site audit Hub members as well as to my Webmaster Training members.

SEO Tips

Helpful Content Update Workshop – Nov 9

I have seen some crazy tips online for how to recover from Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU).

Those tips are dangerous and will tank whatever SEO you have remaining, or hinder Google’s ability to restore your ranking when they roll out some fixes, and I do believe those are coming.

That’s why we’re doing a live workshop in the DIY SEO course for exactly what happened with the HCU and what Google considers helpful these days.

Plus, we’ll look at real sites that got popped, and why that happened to them.

And, we’ll look at both good and bad tips for going forward with changes to your site and content.

I was going to make a paid version available to the public for this workshop, but I can’t.

Here’s why.

You NEED a solid SEO foundation on your site now more than ever.

In fact, 3 of the signals Google is now looking for include your:

• Global SEO settings
• The schema markup your SEO plugin outputs
• Authorship settings

On top of that, you have to get serious about tracking your Search Console ranking and issues so that you can see the fluctuations and problems.

I teach all of this in the DIY SEO course.

Order of SEO Changes Matters

This past week I did 2 consults with clients who were making big changes to their sites.

They wanted to talk through the SEO impact of those changes.

In both cases, the order of the changes would make a HUGE difference to how much their changes would confuse Google, and how fast Google would recover and reindex the site, including the new pages and navigation.

The bottom line is, you are going to take an SEO hit when you change themes because that changes the content on some pages. And you’re going to take a hit when you change your navigation and other important sections on your home page.

Google uses all of those hierarchical structures as clues for what your site is about.

There are definitely ways to minimize the impact and help Google recover from the confusion much faster.

And that’s going to help Google properly rank your new structure, and your whole site the right way too.

Identifying Issues in Search Console

One of my webmasters did a theme redesign for one of her clients back in March.

She may have also helped the client get on GA4 and Search Console too, but I’m not sure about that.

Well, the client started losing traffic in September, likely due to the Helpful Content Update.

She reached out to the webmaster for help to see what the issues in Search Console were, and to verify if they were due to the theme revamp.

The webmaster called on me for a consult.

In about 15 minutes we were able to identify the issues, and their likely causes, most of which had anything to do with the theme revamp.

And some of them had to do with the way the client was using link shorteners, like Bit.ly.

Google was simply reporting that it initially discovered the new page via a bit.ly link, but that it had actually indexed the canonical.

And all of that was perfectly fine.

There was no real issue.

It was just Google simply reporting what it had found.

But, we did find other issues that were related to the theme revamp.

The client used to have their blog archive page as the home page of their site.

And they switched to a static page during the revamp.

What they were seeing in Search Console was related to that switch.

Google had figured out what was going on, but it kept reporting on links it had crawled previously, and that it was still not finding them anymore.

Google has a long memory and it can take 6-9 months for it to drop things that are no longer there if it had previously crawled and indexed them.

Need Help With Your SEO Stuff?

I show a lot of Search Console issue report examples in the DIY SEO course.

But there is no way for it to cover everything.

Sometimes another set of eyes makes it easier to understand what is being reported on your site.

Or, maybe you have a good idea of the SEO impact from a change you want to make on your site, but you just want to run it by someone to be sure.

Live sessions like that are short and inexpensive and give you the confidence you need to move forward.

AI Tips

Do-It-All AI Plugin Review Recap

Thanks to everyone who attended the live session to review an all-in-one AI plugin for WordPress.

We covered every aspect of the plugin and even created new content and images for the site with it.

We also covered the caveats of using such a plugin, including all of the special settings and features that you get from using ChatGPT directly.

I know that because I’m in the AI Success Club from Denise Wakeman and she and Andy cover all of those special settings and features so that we get the most out of the amazing creative ideas ChatGPT offers.

We can also keep our chats private and we can retain them for further conversations.

None of the WP AI plugins can do that.

So, do seriously consider getting into this training for both your content creation and marketing.

It’s an amazing resource and I’m super happy to be part of the training and the community of users.

Impact of AI Executive Order on WordPress and Apps

The President of the U.S. issued an Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence on Oct 30, 2023.

It impacts WAY more than just AI.

It explicitly calls out the responsibilities of all Open Source software too.

WordPress is Open Source, as are many of the plugins we use.

In fact, most of the apps you use daily are Open Source software.

So, this Executive Order is going to have far-reaching impact.

Here are my thoughts on how it will affect us.

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers got the rest of this tip.