Tips Tuesday – WP 7.0 Changes, Google Clicks Off, AI Site Suggestions Bad
Tips this week include:
- Real-time collaboration removed from WP 7.0
- Overhaul of WP.org underway
- Google not showing all clicks
- AI Site improvement suggestions could bork you
- New attack vectors increasing
- Shorts are ramping up everywhere
- Target joins social selling
- AI costs more than humans
WordPress Tips
Real-Time Collaboration Removed from WP 7.0
Matt Mullenweg finally pulled the plug in RTC shipping with WordPress 7.0.
Thank God.
This thing was one big catastrophe waiting to happen.
And what bothers me most is that the majority of WP site owners will never make use of it.
The whole thing is geared toward enterprise-level sites with multiple staff working on the same post at the same time.
I have long said that WP should fork into two versions – one for us bloggers and one for enterprise sites.
And I think this RTC mess just proves why.
But then, that will cause a major headache for plugin devs and the Gutenberg team, so it will likely never happen.
My guess is that they will go forward with the proposed May 20th release. The Beta 4 that will likely be out today will not have RTC and we can all do real testing on it now.
We will still not be the first to update and I’ll have a “What’s New” post for you after the final release.
Overhaul of WP.org Underway
This is what Matt said as reported by The Repository (link above):
“The [Slack] #meta-janitors channel went live on April 18, just days after Mullenweg spent hours in #core-committers saying “the wheels have fallen off” the WordPress project and blaming process creep for a culture that produced what he called “boring or mediocre crap.” Two days later, he turned his attention to Five for the Future, calling the program’s data “worse than useless.” The #meta-janitors channel is where those critiques have turned into action, with a handpicked team entrusted with production access and a mandate to ship fast.”
What This Means for Us
Keep in mind that the Five for the Future program directives are at the heart of the current WP vs WPEngine lawsuits.
And that mess was at the heart of some OGs wanting to start their own plugin and theme repository so it would not solely be under the control of Mullenweg. Too bad that fell apart. But the underlying structure for it is still there. And this may revive it.
To me, this overhaul sounds like Matt wants better data to know who else he should go after for paying back what they earn from running a WordPress-centric business.
But he’s right about one thing. The wheels are falling off – they have been for over a decade.
This is the bane of running an open-source, community-driven piece of software compared to a private company running it. There is no cohesive leadership or directive. Different teams with various objectives run the show.
So, we get what we get from WP and make do.
And I’ll do my best to keep us out of the WP drama and informed if there is anything we actually need to pay attention to going forward.
AI SEO Tips
Google Not Showing All Clicks
Has your traffic from Google really gone down? Maybe not.
It may be that GA4 is lying to you.
Ever since Google started showing AI Overview (AIO) summaries at the top of Search, all SEOs have complained that Click Through Rate has plummeted.
But, when some of those SEOs set up 3rd-party traffic counters, they saw a VERY different story than what GA4 was reporting – that includes folks who are on the paid version of GA4.
This article on Search Engine Journal details the sketchy responses from Google about the apparent loss of CTR and the fact that Google keeps offering answers with zero data to back any of it up.
And now Google promises more link visibility in AIO.
Well, hell Google! That doesn’t help if we can’t accurately track the clicks from them, does it?
AI Site Improvement Suggestions Could Bork You
In the DIY SEO course, we’ll be doing workshops soon where we’ll have Claude review our content and make suggestions on how to improve it.
But here’s the catch with it.
The Claude model is not the one looking at your content. Its AI Agent is crawling your site and making interpretations about it.
And that’s the info that the Claude chatbot your using is basing its response on.
The No Hacks blog has a super article on the new AI Agent Wars that have started.
Here’s a brief on the change:
“Web professionals have spent the last 18 months asking the wrong question. The question was: which AI model should we optimize for. ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Perplexity. Whose citations matter more. Whose crawler should we let through. That conversation made sense when the models read your website directly.
They don’t anymore. The model reads what the runtime hands it. The runtime fetched your page. The runtime parsed it. The runtime executed (or did not execute) your JavaScript. The runtime resolved your structured data. The runtime negotiated authentication. By the time the model sees anything from your website, it is seeing the runtime’s interpretation of it.”
The problem is, our carefully crafted headings and scannable paragraphs make zero difference to an Agent. Our schema markup is not even bothered with.
Bottom line – AI Agents don’t crawl your site like regular Search Bots do.
They’re looking strictly at the lines of text to see if you have crafted a sentence they can jerk out of context and use as a summary.
And if you implement the AI review suggestions, you could very well bork your regular Search interpretation of a well-written post.
And this difference in search goals is exactly what we’ll be covering in the workshops.
Security Tips
New Attack Vectors Increasing
WAF stands for Web Application Firewall. It’s the thing at Cloudflare that catches bad bots and actors before they have a chance to hit your hosting, much less your site.
I watch the Cloudflare changelog closely and I’m seeing updates to the WAF like this one every few days now instead of every few weeks.
We can thank AI for that.
Bad actors can search for, and try to exploit vulnerabilities faster than ever now.
Recently, Cloudflare employed a new AI detection layer to identify these new attack vectors faster too.
This level of protection is available even on the free plans. But, the Pro plans go an extra step with what they can detect. And I configure an additional 30 settings to harden it for my clients.
On top of that, I add even more rules to stop the bots that aren’t doing us any good, like the SEO agencies that are crawling our sites to give ideas to their paying clients for how to rank higher than us.
I could not sleep without my sites being on a properly configured Cloudflare plan that I constantly keep updated with all of their new protection features.
Video Tips
Shorts are Ramping Up Everywhere
Have you heard of the ReelShorts platform? It’s a new microseries site of shows shot in vertical format.
And it has more views than Netflix, Prime Video, or Disney+.
That means every other video platform needs to play catchup.
To answer that call, Google TV will now feature YouTube Shorts on the homepage.
Netflix and Disney+ are ramping up ways to feature more short videos too.
I can see watching these things on a phone or tablet. But on a big screen? I guess if you’re bored enough, flipping through quick videos is something to do.
What this means for us is that short video of all kinds are going to get pushed to the forefront on all platforms.
While I think purely entertainment ones will get the most attention, you better believe that I’ll be focusing on more Shorts for my channels, including posting them to Instagram and TikTok as well as YouTube.
Monetization Tips
Target Joins Social Selling
I have a few clients who have been making bank on brand deals for the past several years.
And now more brands than ever are looking for ambassadors to help them show up where folks are looking now.
Target just announced a new venture called Club Target.
Here’s what they say about it:
“At Target, we’re reimagining social commerce by meeting brand enthusiasts and consumers where they are — from supporting emerging creators through Club Target to giving established creators a more integrated experience through our first-of-its-kind program with LTK,” says Sarah Travis, chief digital and revenue officer, Target. “It’s all in service of amplifying the elevated shopping experience, on-trend assortment and value we offer consumers and creating more seamless pathways from inspiration to purchase.”
So, if you want to make fun videos on cool finds, be sure to check into this new deal.
AI Costs More Than Humans
The AI bubble continues to burst.
Even the Nvidia VP of deep learning is saying so now.
Keep in mind that Nvidia makes the hardware that AI runs on, so they definitely have a dog in the race.
As reported by Axios, “Bryan Catanzaro, the vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia said: “For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees.”
Token rates to use AI models are killing these companies.
And more AI experts are saying that only 23% of industries will see a cost reduction in using AI versus human employees.
This Has Happened Before
I saw this same thing happen with NAFTA back when I was an Electronics Engineer in Field Service. The companies that had the multi-million dollar machines I worked on picked up their factories and moved to Mexico for cheap labor.
However, it took less than a year for them to realize what a mistake it was to make that move, as the culture is very different. The employees did not have the same basic education as in the US and didn’t care for showing up to work every day.
The companies could not meet quotas on production, and what did roll off the line was a subpar product.
But, instead of coming back to the US, those companies moved to Asian countries. Productivity was super high, as was the quality of the work. (Don’t get me started on the lack of human labor laws contributing to the company’s success.)
And that was the nail in the coffin for my 20 years with that company. No factories in my region meant no job for me either.
What does this mean for us?
I don’t think the workforce displaced by AI will move to other countries.
In fact, what we are already seeing is that some of these companies are re-hiring the very folks they replaced with AI. That’s especially true in the support sector.
People want to connect with people.
Keep showing up as a human who knows their stuff and the visibility will return.
