Tips Tuesday – Spam Filters, SEO Feedback, Site Themes, Ahrefs Search, IndexNow

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• New tutorial on Antispam Bee for comment spam filtering
• New tutorial on creating Google reCAPTCHA v3 keys
• Why I’m testing a new spam filtering combo and leaving CleanTalk
• Session 2 of Group Content Feedback is tonight for the DIY SEO course
• The status of WP 6.0.1 update and what’s taking so long to release it
• Why it might be time for you to think about getting a new site theme
• The theme frameworks I like and a few caveats to watch out for
• What you’re missing if you don’t hire a webmaster designer to help you
• Ahrefs is creating a search engine to pay creators
• Why I’m surprised that Yoast SEO will soon be supporting IndexNow

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BlogAid Happenings

June and July are typically busy months for client work, especially site audits, as folks want to get finished with that before their holiday posting season kicks into high gear. 

And, I’ve also been busy making new tutorials for you too.

Antispam Bee for Comment Spam Filter Settings

See how to fully configure the Antispam Bee plugin for max protection on your site.

FYI, if you’re a site audit client, this has already been done for you.

Create Google reCaptcha v3 Keys

See how to get your Google reCaptcha v3 keys and delete your old v2 keys if you were using those.

Testing New Spam Filter Combo

Both of these tutorials are part of a test, as I’m coming off CleanTalk which I was using to filter spam for both comments and all forms on the site, including the optins and such. 

I’ll be going back to Antispam Bee once again for the comment spam. And returning to reCAPTCHA v3 for the contact form spam, as it has been improved.

I sent extra instructions about all of this to my BB Hub folks, who are my DIY site audit clients, including what we’re keeping an eye on with this combo test.

And I’ve asked them to report what they are seeing so we can get consensus from the village about the best way to beat spam.

Site Services Update

We’re doing a whole bunch of migrations and migration/audit combos right now, as more folks move to better hosting. And of course, many of my BB Hubbers have their annual audit check ups coming due right now too. Those are so quick, easy, and cheap!!!

The waitlist is running into the end of July, which is the usual 4-6 week wait.

So, if you’re due for a checkup, or want to get your project finished before summer is out, now is the time to make that request.

BlogAid Course Happenings

Group Content Feedback for SEO Session Today

We had a super live session last week with DIY SEO course members to go over their content for better user experience and SEO.

And, special guest Shannon Entin of Content Refresh was with us. She’s at the top of the SEO game and she stands ready to help turn your content into SEO gold too.

We’re meeting at an alternate day and time this week, which will be at 8pm ET tonight, to give more folks a chance to attend a live session and get their content reviewed too.

FYI, tonight’s session will be the only one this week. We’ll resume normal workshops next week.

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

WordPress Tips

WP 6.0.1 Status

Seems to me that each of the last 4-5 major releases from WP have been super slow to get out the follow up .1 version to fix more bugs found once more folks installed it.

That .1 version with the bug fixes usually rolled out within a few days, or maybe a week. 

But for most of last year and all of this year it’s been a delay of like 3 weeks. 

And version 6.0 is no exception.

Want to know why?

It’s all the new FSE (Full Site Editing) stuff that is holding things up.

You can see the status for yourself.

Seems to me that they should prioritize the non FSE bugs and get that rolled out first, as it affects the most users.

So, we’re still waiting to do the 6.0 update because I found bugs in it.

And I’m still waiting for the bug fix before I even finish the scripts for the Gutenberg Ninja tutorial updates, much less make those videos, as I believe they will tweak something else in them before the final .1 bug fix release.

I will also say that most of my webmasters have already updated their sites and their client sites without issue.

But, I know that at least 2 of the bugs will affect my peeps, like the center image alignment issue. So, I’m holding off with saying it’s okay to update for now.

BlogAid News subscribers will get first word and special instructions when I believe it is safe for most of us to update.

Theme Tips

Is It Time for a New Theme?

In a recent audit I noticed a PHP error being thrown by a client’s theme. It was due to missing the new theme.json file.

That file is required for FSE compliant themes. And since none of us are using one of those yet, I was surprised to see an error for it not being present.

I was not familiar with the theme she was using, so I don’t know what the base framework was that it came from. And therefore, I don’t think this is a widespread issue.

But, it does speak to the fact that you might need to consider getting a more modern theme base if yours is over 3 years old as it is likely not fully compliant with all of the WP core changes that have been happening since they started bringing in FSE and Accessibilities compliance things to the core code.

Frameworks and Caveats

Astra, Kadence, and Genesis are all still your best bets for solid theme frameworks.

But to get the benefits of FSE-like styling options without relying on WP core FSE stuff, you will need to get the paid Pro addons for both Astra and Kadence. I’m not sure if you have to have it for Genesis or not, but my guess is that maybe you do. I’m not sure.

I just don’t think FSE in WP core is ready for primetime yet. And with the rate of bugs we have been seeing in every major WP release, I don’t think it will be ready until sometime in 2023.

So, you’ll get a lot more stable theme that will continue to be supported for the next 2-3 years if you go with these other frameworks and their version of FSE-like styling options for header, footer, and such in their paid Pro versions.

Hire a Qualified Webmaster Designer

Plus, with Astra, Kadence, and even GeneratePress, you do need a child theme so that you can safely turn off the Microdata schema markup output that competes with your SEO plugin’s JSON-LD schema markup output.

The webmaster designers that I send my clients to know all about this stuff, as well as speed, security, HTTPS security, Accessibilities compliance, and more.

If you don’t know all about those things, then seriously consider the fact that a webmaster designer is very much worth paying for up front. And that’s a LOT cheaper than trying to go in behind you and clean up the styling mess you might have made of things because you were suffering from what you didn’t know that you didn’t know.

Get a Site Audit First

FYI, I do not make referrals to my webmaster designers for non-clients. The only folks I send them are site owners who have had an audit and we have fixed all of the issues like plugin conflicts, poor extra coding, speed, and security, including HTTPS security. And those clients already know how to use Gutenberg, as all themes use blocks instead of widgets now too.

That way both of y’all can focus on just the design process.

SEO Tips

Ahrefs Creates Search Engine to Pay Creators

I have long complained that I’m not a staff writer for Google.

You know, it used to be that the goal of Google as a search engine was to crawl the web and sort what it finds so that it coud bring the cream of the crop to the top. That way they would become a useful resource to the general public.

Then, they started selling ad space to show for relevant queries.

Okay, that’s fine. Google needs to make money to pay for all that hardware and electricity to crawl the web and maintain the database of results.

And then Google got greedy and made most all of page 1 just ads, which made searchers have to scroll too far to find non-sponsored content.

So then Google decided to start putting the answer to a query in a snippet at the top.

That way Google once again became useful by delivering the answer to the query.

But, that also kept the searcher on Google, where they would see their ads.

Folks stopped having a reason to click over to the website of the creator who supplied that correct answer.

I have LONG complained that I did not volunteer to be an unpaid staff writer for Google.

The only way I make money is if someone clicks over from that search result and lands on my site to see my offers and ways to follow me to see more of my content.

And that’s been happening less and less as Google literally uses as much of my content as they want to keep folks on Google to see their ads.

They have lost all incentive to send folks off Google.

The only way I am sure I will make a dime from being the top content on Google is when they promote one of my YouTube videos. And I still split the ad revenue with them.

Well, the SEO tool maker Ahrefs is taking that complaint about how Google is using other people’s content to make money only for themselves seriously.

Ahrefs is sinking $60 million into building its own search engine.

And they plan to pay creators of the top ranking content.

Here’s what the CEO of Ahrefs said:

“Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work. We saw how YouTube’s profit-sharing model made the whole video-making industry thrive. Splitting advertising profits 90/10 with content authors, we want to give a push towards treating talent fairly in the search industry.”

That’s great news!

But here are the caveats.

While $60mil sounds like a lot, it’s a drop in the bucket of the budget they need to make this work.

That budget has to include the hardware needed to crawl the web independently. Right now, Ahrefs and SEMRush and other such SEO tool companies rely on API pings from Google and Bing in addition to the crawls they do themselves. And let me tell you, their crawls are maybe 10% the volume of what Google crawls. I know because bot hits are something I track in site audits.

That budget also has to cover marketing to get searchers to use the Ahrefs engine, which they are calling Yep. I think they should have spent more of that marketing budget coming up with a better name.

Both Bing and Duck Duck Go have spent $60m each trying to get the word out that they exist and promote usage. And neither of them are anywhere near overtaking Google in use percentage.

And then, what are they going to do about privacy and cookie tracking? Are they going to come up with their own browser too, like Bing and Duck Duck Go have?

Lots of questions, few answers right now.

But at least their heart is in the right place.

And as we move into the new creator economy, perhaps the buzz from that will help bring over some searchers.

Plus, when the cookie tracking news comes back up next year over Google dropping 3rd party cookie tracking, that will also bring with it all of the privacy concerns that folks already have with Google and Microsoft now.

So, I’ll be keeping my eye on this for us, as my clients are reporting that they have been getting traffic from Duck Duck Go and Bing for the last couple of years and it’s still growing.

But, I don’t expect Yep to be a real contender for at least another year, if not longer.

Yoast SEO to Support IndexNow

Yoast de Volk is pretty active on his own blog now that he has stepped away from day-to-day operations at Yoast SEO, and is now only consulting.

And in a recent post he proposed that search engines only crawl what we explicitly tell them to crawl on our sites via what we include only in our XML sitemap. One of the perks he points out is how much crawl budget that would save search engines.

Well, that’s a nice pipe dream.

But, that’s also why many of us have a robots.txt file – it tells bots where not to crawl. The problem is that it’s just a suggestion and ill-behaved bots are going to crawl whatever they want to anyway.

Now, there are ways we can block those bots, and in fact I do that for my clients with firewall rules at Cloudflare. 

We have enjoyed a 50%-70% drop in bad bots and/or SEO agency bots that are chewing up our hosting resources to crawl our sites and give that info to our competition – you know, like Ahrefs does.

But, in that same article, Yoast mentioned that the Yoast SEO plugin will soon be supporting IndexNow.

Wait. What?

Isn’t this the very same thing he said was a bad idea because it did not respect what we had marked as nofollow, noindex in Yoast and would let bots crawl things that we didn’t want in search, like thin content pages such as the Thank You page we send folks to when they fill out our contact form?

So, I’m going to have to dig into this a bit more and see if this integration is done in a way that forces IndexNow to respect our XML sitemap exclusions in Yoast.

I’m assuming that’s the case, but I need to verify it.

And, if it is the case, then we will be using it and we will finally have an automated way to ping Bing and other search engines that do not have the big crawl budget that Google has.

I’ll definitely let you know what I find.

And I’ll be updating my Yoast tutorials in the DIY SEO course for it too.

Wrap Up

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

Thanks for sharing this podcast and post with your blogging buddies, and for leaving comments and reviews too.

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