Tips Tuesday – Privacy Consent,  Author Verification, YouTube Chapter Linking

Tips this week include:

• WP 7.1.3 release
• WP 7.2 release coming
• Custom cron jobs dropped
• New lawsuits for tracking prior to consent
• GDPR vs FCC vs State privacy laws
• Real-time collaboration is now a plugin
• CSS in WP Core standards change
• Whitelist Zoho to Gmail forward
• Is Rank Tracking a thing of the past?
• Today’s AI is not profitable
• Google completes September Spam Update
• Claude AI cracks down on face sources
• New authorship proof tutorial
• Chapter linking works on YouTube
• Why I stopped linking to my other sites

WordPress Tips

WP 7.1.3 Release

The WordPress 7.1.3 security update rolled out last Tuesday.

There are multiple security fixes in it.

Make sure your site has auto updated to it.

WP 7.2 Release Coming

The Beta 1 should roll out on Oct 20th. Final release will be in early December.

I’m not seeing any big, scary stuff in this one, thankfully. But, I haven’t finished digging into the core changes yet.

Custom Cron Jobs Dropped

Do you remember a month or so ago when the Tips Tuesday posts did not publish on schedule?

I discovered that my custom cron job had been removed. I created a new one.

A couple of weeks later, I checked my backups before doing updates on my sites and noticed that a couple of them were not taking backups on their weekly schedule. And sure enough, their custom cron jobs were gone too.

I contacted Dustin at Iridium Hosting and he discovered that there has been a change to the way cPanel does the handshake on certain security setups and that is what is randomly removing the custom cron job.

Since this affects our backups and post scheduling, plus all of the other 20+ jobs that WP runs in the background, I asked him to create an alert on the server.

It scans the wp-config file to see if the regular WP cron has been turned off, and if so, then checks for a custom cron job. If it is missing, he will replace it.

I’m not sure how often it does that scan, and hopefully all instances of that change are now over. But if you have a post that doesn’t publish on time or a backup that didn’t run, that will likely be the issue.

And it would be a good idea to get in the habit of checking that your backups are running on schedule before you do an update anyway.

New Lawsuits for Tracking Prior to Consent

An old wiretapping law in a southern-most state (think peninsula) is now being applied to websites that use cookies of any kind.

At this time, they are targeting e-commerce sites that are loading cookies before consent is given.

Those cookies include, but are not limited to:

• GA4 (Google)
• Meta (Facebook) Pixel
• Pinterest 
• Klaviyo

Note that it calls out cookies that are loaded prior to the consent request. Loading and reporting are two very different things. And that is the main focus of my research.

GDPR vs FCC vs State Privacy Laws

Just because you are in the U.S. and your site targets a U.S. audience doesn’t mean that you can ignore the kind of privacy protection requirements listed in the EU’s guidelines for GDPR.

The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has similar laws but they have chosen not to aggressively enforce them – yet.

Also, many U.S. states have their own privacy laws and new ones are coming on the books every year.

Some folks have taken to simply blocking all IPs that originate outside the U.S. That’s not enough to be in compliance.

And if you’re relying solely on the consent that your ad agency provides, that may not be enough either. That covers the cookie tracking for the ads and not all of the other cookies you use.

Real-Time Collaboration is a Now a Plugin

I am SO glad to read this!!!

Some WP devs fought like crazy to get real-time collaboration added to WP core even though the majority of sites don’t need or even want it. And this is one of the big things I warned y’all about that could break our sites with the 7.0 update.

And since they couldn’t get it into core, it has now become a plugin, which is what it should stay.

It’s called Presence API and it has had some much-needed critical improvements, like how the lockout is handled when more than one person is trying to edit the same post/page.

CSS in Core Standards Change

Webmasters and designers – heads up!!!

There is a proposal to change how WP handles the CSS in themes.

You’ll want to check with the base frameworks that you use to ensure they are keeping up with this.

Whitelist Zoho to Gmail Forward

Google has really cracked down on folks using free Gmail on SMTP.

Most of us have a Workspace Gmail account, and that’s still the preferred one, and then use FluentSMTP for sending emails from the site. (WP Mail SMTP is an okay alternative.)

But, some folks use Zoho for email and SMTP and then forward that to a free Gmail account.

If that’s you, Gmail may be sending your Zoho email to spam and auto-deleting it.

So, in your Gmail account, you’ll want to whitelist your Zoho email address and ensure it is set to send to your Inbox.

For my site audit clients, you’ll find a tutorial in your Hub membership for how to whitelist in Workspace Gmail. It’s pretty much the same for free Gmail too.

SEO Tips

Is Rank Tracking a Thing of the Past?

Google is getting fed up with bots scraping SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Aww, poor baby!! You mean AIs are stealing the work you put time and money into creating?

Bless your heart!

According to this Search Engine Journal article, Google may stop all forms of rank tracking.

The article says this may be why:

“What may be a reason behind Google’s actions to stop rank tracking is that the amount of AI Agent traffic has grown exponentially. According to Cloudflare, which is in a position to monitor web traffic, AI agent website traffic has increased 1,700% over the past year.”

But this is the real reason – money:

“The problem for Google is that a massive amount of traffic could cause latency issues in serving search results, including AI search results. This is a bigger problem for keywords that trigger AI-driven search results because those are computationally more expensive to generate.”

Today’s AI is Not Profitable

Google has used AI for well over a decade to help it sort and rank the insane volume of data it gathers.

But, there is NO company that has made public-facing AI profitable.

You may recall that Google was the last one to add AI summaries, much less a publicly available LLM.

That’s because Google has always had their eyes on the bottom line.

And now, other AIs stealing their work is costing them money.

Welcome to our world, Google!!!!!!!

Google made a decision last year to devote itself to being an answer engine where they want to keep visitors on their site. And until they reverse that stance and return to being a search engine with linked sources, I don’t think they can remain profitable.

Money is the only voice they hear. So, we’ll see what becomes of this and how it affects you and me as bloggers.

Google Completes September Spam Update

As I reported recently, Google is cracking down hard on AI junk content. And their first update to get rid of it just completed on Oct. 8th. There will be more of them. In fact, a major update is likely coming soon.

And other AIs are starting to do this too, as you’ll see below.

Claude AI Cracks Down on Fake Sources

This is good news for us bloggers.

Pro SEOs have been using the same black-hat SEO tricks on AI crawlers that used to work on Google back in the day.

They do things like create a bunch of little, zero-authority sites that all mention and link back to the main site that they are trying to cite in AI search. They are also seeding that main site with things that the AI crawlers are looking for in a way that is similar to keyword stuffing.

Anthropic’s crawlers have finally figured this out and they created new rules for Claude:

“Anthropic’s updated usage policy, which takes effect Nov. 12, prohibits using Claude to seed the sources that search engines and AI systems draw answers from with content that misrepresents its origin, authorship, or independence. The policy’s example is a network of sites that pose as unrelated sources and back the same claims.”

New Authorship Proof Tutorial 

To help them cut down on AI junk, one of the big things that Google and other AIs are looking for is proof that a real human created the content.

I reported on this a couple of weeks ago and have been doing tests since.

I’ve made a new tutorial available to my site audit clients and DIY SEO course members to fix issues with their author schema markup and link triangle.

It will help bot crawlers ensure that a real person authored the content.

Video SEO

Chapter Linking Works

I recently released 3 product reviews on my Heartwood Art channel and 1 of them took off like crazy.

I’ve been digging into my analytics on it and one thing is standing out. The biggest watchtime comes in the middle of the video.

In this particular video, I do an unbox, assemble, and live tests. The big bump in watchtime is right where the live testing and review starts.

My view sources are 80% external, and almost all of those are Google Search.

This tells me that folks are searching for reviews and demos on this product and Google is showing my video, but linking to the specific time index where my live testing starts.

The nice thing about this video is that it is long enough for mid-roll ads. So folks are seeing at least one ad even though they are not watching the video from the beginning.

Why I Stopped Linking to Heartwood Art

One of my followers asked in the comments of a recent Tips Tuesday why I didn’t link to my Heartwood Art site and YouTube channel when I gave updates for you on how it’s doing.

It is a strategic decision based in part on what’s happening in the AI landscape – like Claude cracking down on backlinks from unrelated sites.

The other reason is because Google is showing my YouTube videos in their AI summaries more. And I don’t want to goof my YouTube analytics by sending a bunch of direct traffic from an unrelated topic site. 

Google knows exactly the demographic that needs to see my site content and videos based on their search and online activity logs. If a bunch of folks visit who don’t normally search for or watch the topics I have in my content, it confuses the algorithm.

If you’re actually interested in seeing the content, then you doing a legit search for it and clicking that search result link does me more good, algorithmically, than clicking a backlink in this Tips Tuesday post.