Tips Tuesday – Stop Exhausting Host Resources, What Google’s Ranking

Tips this week include:

• Reminder to log out of your site
• PHP exhaustion issues
• New WP AI proposal rejected by devs
• Ride out the AI content wave
• Google ranking Meta posts – and what I’m doing
• Facebook Creator Studio Relaunched
• Llms.txt files aren’t being read
• Google’s new AI Markdown
• Claude data stolen
• What to check in who you vote for

WordPress Tips

Log Out Reminder

Every minute you are accessing your site while logged in, your host server is constantly being pinged to deliver non-cached data to you.

So, be careful of how many admin tabs you have open at a time.

And definitely be sure that you log out of your site when you’re not working on it.

Also, close all open tabs that are displaying your site even when you’re not logged in.

Otherwise, you’re chewing up your hosting resources, and we can’t afford to do that now that we have so many more bot hits, including good AI bots.

All of these extra hits also cause a speed drag and can even cause faults or errors due to too many hits on the same things at the same time.

PHP Exhaustion 

The main coding language behind WordPress and the host it runs on is PHP.

And bot traffic is now causing a PHP exhaustion issue at the hosting level.

This is one of the reasons I do audits on my client’s sites every 6 months.

I’m checking the bots that are hitting our sites and constantly evolving protection against the bad ones to reduce the load.

This process started as a speed issue.

But then it turned into a security measure too.

And now it has become a bad AI bot deterrent as well.

Nothing about these settings at both Cloudflare and the host are set-and-forget. They need constant monitoring and updating.

And if you don’t think you have a problem, come get an audit and I’ll show you just how bad it is.

New WP AI Proposal Rejected by Devs

Custom Post Types (CPT) have been in WordPress for a long time.

Many of you already use them, like for recipe posts. That plugin you use for them makes it a Recipe Custom Post Type, replete with the appropriate schema markup too.

Well, now there is a proposal to add a new CPT called Knowledge Custom Post Type (KCPT).

Right now, it’s for internal use as a centralized repo of the style guidelines for the site. It’s made to be used by internal AI Agents to follow the site’s styles when it is generating content on its own.

I can see where this would be helpful for folks who run news sites and have set up external AI Agents to scan the web for news in their niche, and then have their own internal site AI Agents write a blog post about it. In fact, there are many sites already doing such things; they just have a kluged together way of making it happen. And the posts have to be manually edited to match the site’s style guidelines. This new proposal would fix that styling issue.

The KCPT is already in the Gutenberg Plugin, which is where they test beta features to help get them ready to go into WP core.

But, the Knowledge Custom Post Type is getting strong pushback from WP core devs.

They say this is a feature that should remain as a plugin because so few site owners will have need of it.

I’m in agreement with that assessment as AI continues to eat its own tail, and the junk picked up by AI Agents that are scanning the web is going to become mostly AI generated content in the first place. So it will be AI rehashing AI. And we had rather write our own content, thank you!!

AI SEO Tips

Ride Out the AI Content Wave

Well crafted, fact-checked content that is written by humans is going to get drowned out by this AI circle junk for a while.

But folks searching for real info are going to get fed up with it and eventually find their way back to sites run by human writers like us.

The trick for us will be ensuring that those who seek can find us. Below is some help with that.

Google Ranking Meta Posts

Last year, during a workshop in the DIY SEO course, we covered how many Facebook posts are being ranked in Google Search.

That number has only increased over the last year.

Many times, those posts are outranking Reddit too.

So, be sure to double down on your Facebook page and Instagram promotions.

Those are 2 hot places seekers can find you.

I’d double down on Pinterest right now too.

Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

I believe in what I’m telling you about Meta and Pinterest so much that I’ll be spending a big part of this summer creating campaigns for Heartwood Art to help more folks find my YouTube videos as well as my site.

Facebook Creator Studio Relaunched

This may help us with our Meta campaigns.

Here’s the announcement about the new standalone AI App.

I’m not sure if I like it or not.

There is a waitlist, so I’ll reserve my opinion until I see it.

I’ll do a DIY SEO workshop when more folks have it.

llms.txt Files Aren’t Being Read

Ahrefs analyzed 137,000 sites and found that on 97% of them, their llms.txt file was not being read by AI crawlers.

I’ve been telling you this all along.

And after I showed my DIY SEO folks what’s in that file during a recent workshop, few wanted to use it.

I have removed it from the sites I was testing it on too.

Google’s New AI Markdown

Google just released its Open Knowledge Format which is markdown specifically for AI Agents.

The writer of this article has released a tool that will crawl 100 pages of your site and generate your OKF bundle.

I think that’s a good first step compared to creating one by hand.

But, I won’t be using this tool.

We need a way for it to determine what our most important pages are, and to do it for us on a continuous basis.

This May Be Our AI SEO Ticket

I will most definitely be keeping close watch on this OKF simply because it was released by Google and is built atop older Knowledge Graph tools they already have.

And y’all know how Google is about using their own stuff compared to using the standard someone else comes up with.

And that just may be our edge this time.

I suspect that we’ll eventually see standalone plugins that will generate an OKF bundle.

And I’ll be watching the Yoast SEO plugin closely to see if they integrate it.

For now, be patient, as nothing is crawling this thing yet. But Google may very well change that.

And I’ll be on top of it for us.

AI Tips

Claude Account Correction

A few weeks ago I shared that I use Claude by Anthropic instead of ChatGPT by OpenAI.

And I said that you didn’t need an account to use the free version.

I was mistaken. You do need an account with Anthropic.

Claude Data Stolen

Anthropic is crying foul because it seems Alibaba has been skimming Claude’s info.

Of course, when Anthropic did that to our content, they called it Training Data.

Obviously there is no honor among thieves.

Karma’s a bitch, huh?

Watch Who You Vote For

AI companies are pumping extreme money into politics now.

Take the recent Congressional primary in New York City, for example. A full $30 million was spent by AI companies to ensure their candidate won. And this was just a primary!!!!!

Those companies want zero AI regulation.

Pay attention to your local elections too – unless of course you want data centers to be built in every spare parcel of land around you and AI used as surveillance on you.