Tips Tuesday – Yoast Schema Aggregator, Instagram and Pinterest Moves, Cloudflare Security Report

Tips this week include:

• FAIR is postponed, for now
• Yoast SEO’s new Schema Aggregator
• Update on Google’s new AI page generation patent
• 2026 Cloudflare threat report
• State actors play a role in cybersecurity
• Data centers targeted
• Instagram Strategy Update
• Pinterest is up to something
• A super AI bright spot coming to help us

WordPress Tips

FAIR is Postponed, For Now

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been reporting on the lack of movement concerning the Matt Mullenweg vs WP Engine lawsuit, and the FAIR project, which would give us an alternative connection to WP.org.

And last week I reported that Joost de Valk had stepped away from the FAIR project.

Now, one of the OGs I respect the most, Carrie Dils, has also stepped away.

She shares her thoughts in her post Building FAIR, and Letting Go of What Could Have Been.

Even with all of these top-level folks stepping away, Carrie says the project is not dead. They have proof of concept that what was built will work. It’s just a matter of support and adoption.

Too many entities just don’t want to pick sides in the lawsuit fight right now.

So, I’ll watch for how the lawsuits turn out, and how those results will either light a fire under projects like FAIR, or how they throw water on it.

I’ll keep you posted.

SEO Tips

Yoast SEO’s New Schema Aggregator

This past week I’ve been looking into the features of the new Schema Aggregator in the Yoast SEO plugin.

And I think this take on it from Search Engine Journal is a little clearer than the info Yoast put out about it.

The Yoast SEO plugin already outputs exceptionally good schema markup that is in the proper hierarchy that Google and other Search Engines prefer. (It’s not just about using JSON markup, it’s about the top-level choices and order too. No other plugin does it as well, IMO.)

Well, this new Schema Aggregator arranges all of it into something that is more palatable to AI Search bots.

I’ve already seen a couple of updates to the plugin to fix bugs in this thing, so it’s not ready for prime time yet (and is turned off by default). It may be a while before we turn it on.

I told you a few weeks ago that the NLWeb Project from Microsoft looked like the most promising way to establish a standard for all AI Crawl/Search bots, and the folks at Yoast are seeing that same potential. That’s why they chose to collaborate with the NLWeb Project, and what we are seeing in the plugin is a direct result of that collaboration.

I’ll keep you posted.

Google’s New AI Page Generation Update

Last week I told you about Google’s patent for dynamically generating AI pages instead of sending folks to your site for the info.

Well, the folks over at Search Engine Journal are now reporting that this patent only extends to e-comm products and ads.

I’ll keep my eyes on it to see if they try to extend that function to other types of Search results.

Security Tips

2026 Cloudflare Threat Report

For the past several months I’ve been telling you how AI is being used by hackers to accelerate ways to find and execute security attacks and breaches.

Some of them happen so fast that there is no way for humans to notice and react quickly enough before the damage is done.

Now Cloudflare is fighting fire with fire.

In their 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report, their new “Cloudforce One leverages a unique blend of internal expertise and global telemetry to uncover insights that traditional security models miss.”

Remember last week when I told you the security threats are now complex and layered in ways that help them fly under the detection radar?

Well, now Cloudflare is using their own AI to help connect the dots on various attacks that would not otherwise seem connected.

It can track everything from “stealthy exploitation to attempted blackout.”

We knew this was coming, and now here we are – in a bot fighting bot war.

State Actors Play a Role in Cybersecurity

Way too many of the AI-fueled bot attacks are coming from countries who sponsor cyber warfare. 

Even the Cloudflare Threat Report calls out how much worse that has gotten in the last year.

So, as tensions rise with this current U.S. war, we may see more disruptions to big entites and/or the entire internet.

That includes big entities rushing new code into a live environment to help mitigate these bot attacks. Recently we’ve seen 2-3 big entities go down over a code update that had bugs or conflicts.

Data Centers Targeted

Retaliatory strikes by Iran have targeted data centers in several countries.

The beauty of cloud storage is that the backup data can be moved to servers anywhere in the world.

The bane of doing that is latency, meaning slower transfer speeds.

Speed = money, especially for e-comm sites.

So, these strikes were not just about military-related data that might be on those servers. It’s also about crippling trade.

Protecting You

I’m doing all I can to ensure that your site is protected from the growing threats.

But keep in mind that the big entities that control access to huge sections of the internet are coming under increasing attack too.

The main thing for you to do is not panic if your site becomes unavailable.

In 99.9% cases, the issue is not the hosting. It’s something outside that moat, like Cloudflare, or a DNS resolver, or an internet hub.

For my site audit Hub clients and Webmasters, our respective Facebook groups are the best place for you to report or see reports from others about what’s going on.

And you’re welcome to report outages beyond our sites, like Amazon going down for a while last Thursday from a coding update. It helps us be aware of issues across the internet that may seem unrelated at first.

Social Media Tips

Instagram Strategy Update

Last year in the DIY SEO course we took a deep dive into getting more traffic from social platforms, especially those that are being crawled by Search Engines.

And the big winner in getting more views for most of us is Instagram.

There are 5 big IG updates that are rolling out right now that you most definitely need to know about, especially if you do Reels.

See this post on Social Media Examiner to help you establish an IG strategy for 2026 that takes advantage of the changes.

Pinterest is Up to Something

Last week, Pinterest stock soared.

Elliott Investment Management made a $1 billion investment into the company. And then Pinterest started a very aggressive $3.5 billion share buy back program.

Pinterest stock has been all over the place for the last couple of years.

So, this big money movement may be a signal that they have a plan to make a change that will increase and sustain the stock value.

What does that mean for those of us who pin our content?

We’ll see, but my bet is on something like more ads, not more content.

They tried this before and it drove folks off the platform, both pinners and viewers.

They righted that sinking ship and did all they could to make the platform attractive to content creators again.

But, most companies have a short memory and none of them, not a single one, give enough credit to the hard work of the content creators that make the platforms fun and interesting for viewers. And they try to remix the content to ad ratio to take in way more than they pay out. And then realize that nobody wants to be on a platform full of ads. When the viewers drop, the advertisers move on, and then the platform’s pendulum swings back to being creator friendly again. 

And here we are just riding the waves.

AI Bright Spot

OMG! You would not believe what I saw over the weekend!!

Y’all know that I’m not a fan of vibe coding – where folks who have no developer background are using AI to build things that they don’t know how to test or keep secure. I cringe every time I think about these apps being deployed.

But this weekend, I got to see what a few experienced devs are building.

They blew my hair back!!!!!

I can’t tell you what these things are yet, but I can tell you they are directly related to site ownership – every part of it.

And when these things start coming out, we will have quantum leap advancements in every area.

What I’m most encouraged about is how these devs are using AI. It reminds me a lot of how Michaelangelo worked.

Once he had the vision of what should become of a marble slab, he hired others to rough it out. Then he stepped in to do the master carving. And then he hired others to polish it.

These devs don’t input prompts and leave it all up to the AI to figure out the whole thing.

They treat the AI as a worker to do the mundane parts of it.

The dev tells the AI exactly what the function will be, what type of coding to use, how to layout the interface, etc. Then they let the AI write the 14,000 lines of code of the rough out. Then the dev steps in to do the master work. And then he/she lets AI do the polishing.

THIS is how AI can make someone 10x more productive – by taking away the mundane parts. It’s exactly how dev shops work where the senior dev lays out the plan and the junior devs write the different sections of code. Then the senior checks fit and function and also does all of the beta testing. The junior devs do the final tweaking to polish that master vision.

I am SO excited about what I saw that I wanted to become an angel investor on the spot.

I’m also very excited to have been asked to do some of the testing, and perhaps create some of the support documentation too.

It may be a while before I can tell you more. Just know that good things are coming from AI that will benefit all site owners.