Bringing Back Old WordPress

Going Back to WordPress 3.8 is Easy

Do you hate the latest version of WordPress? Sick of the horrible visual mode editor, lost your favourite advanced editor? Detest the new image manager?

A know a lot of people who are, who cannot live with the new things WP4 has brought along. People who are so desperate to have functional content editing tools they were thinking of switching platforms. Some of these people are my clients! In fact most of my clients have been complaining since WordPress 3.9 arrived, wanting their easy to use tools back.

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Wishing For Spam Free Hosting

Are You Wishing For Spam Free Secure Hosting

Do you wish you could host your WordPress blog (self-hosted) where spam wasn’t a problem, where hackers couldn’t damage your site, where your host took effective steps to keep spammers and hackers away from your blog?

Are you fed-up with all the spam and hacker attacks from China, the former Soviet states and other notorious regions, the sharply rising level of cyber-attacks from the middle east and northern Africa?

Are all the hacking attacks and login attacks from hacked web sites and bad-host web-servers giving you grey hairs?

Ban Web Server Traffic

Web Server Traffic Should be Banned

Opinions will differ about putting a ban on web server traffic. There are those who want their blogs and websites free from malicious activity, safe and secure for genuine valuable visitors. Then there are those who think there should be no restrictions on web traffic and activity (some even think spam is not bad).

Let’s clarify the web traffic we’re talking about. We’re not talking of banning referer traffic i.e. traffic from good back-links from websites resulting in genuine visitors.

Google Bounce Rate Value

Does Google Bounce Rate Analytic Have Any Real Value

SEO experts tell us a low bounce rate is important for site ranking in Google SERP. Bounce rate is an indicator of quality content on our blogs and websites. The lower the bounce rate, the better our sites will rank…

Google Analytics shows a bounce rate statistic for our sites. Just how accurate is this analytic statistic, how much credence should we give it?

What is Bounce Rate?

Simply put, bounce rate is the ratio between visitors arriving on our site and viewing more than one page to the number of arriving visitors who leave immediately. If we have a high percent of visitors who stay around to read more than one post we can assume they found our blog useful and interesting.

Panopta.com Pest Bot

Checks.Panopta.com – nuisance bot

Panopta.com calls itself “Uptime Management Software for Hosting Providers, SaaS Providers, IT Managers, and Website Owners”.  Well, there’s nothing wrong with the idea. If your website is critical to your business it’s not a bad thing to get alerted if or when your site is offline.

But Did You Subscribe to Panopta.com?

Panopta.com monitoring service allows other people to monitor your website! That’s right, you don’t have to sign up for their service for your domain to be monitored. This means a business competitor can monitor your website status without your permission!

Massive Number Websites in Botnet

Massive Number of Hacked USA Websites Participate in WordPress Botnet Attack

For the past couple of days we’ve been watching a customers WordPress site being attacked by a botnet of websites trying to access site admin with user name “admin” and a variety of simple passwords.

Most of these attacks are coming from USA based web hosting services. One particular top level service provider, Provo Unified Layer, stands out above the rest as the most hacked network. Many 2nd tier providers use Provo Unified Layer infrastructure including Bluehost and Hostmonster. Of the hosts using Provo Unified Layer infrastructure, Bluehost is ahead of the pack in having hosted sites participating in the botnet. (Read more about Bluehost and the Botnet).

GNAX Hosting Review

How Good is GNAX Hosting

Let me start by saying my own sites are hosted on the GNAX (General Net Access) network. We’ve been using the GNAX backbone since October 2012. If I wasn’t completely satisfied with the service, I would have moved my sites long ago.

GNAX hosting also provides the international backbone for our fully managed hosting service.

GNAX is VPS or Higher

GNAX is not your regular hosting service provider. They don’t offer the shared hosting packages most of us use for our WordPress sites.

The lowest level hosting you can get with GNAX is your own VPS. If you are looking for el-cheapo shared hosting, GNAX hosting is not the place to look.

If you are wanting shared hosting, you need to look for a second or 3rd tier service provider. You cannot sign up for a shared hosting account directly with GNAX.

Broken Links Bad For Website

Will Broken Links Harm Your Google Website Ranking?

The first answer to will broken links harm your Google ranking is no. The second answer is yes.

Broken Links Won’t Harm Your Website

Google says “Generally, 404 errors don’t impact your site’s ranking in Google.” Note the word ‘generally’

404s are a perfectly normal part of the web. You will likely never be able to control every link to your site, or resolve every 404 error listed in Webmaster Tools. Instead, check the top-ranking issues and fix those if possible” Read more…

This is of course only part of the story. Google’s info page doesn’t mention anything about the number of broken links. It’s perfectly normal for Google to find broken links to your website from other websites.

Google Drops Real Estate MLS Listings

Will Google Stop Indexing Real Estate Website MLS Listings

Is Google going to stop indexing MLS listings on real estate websites? It’s a rumour we came across recently! Disturbingly, the source of the rumour came from an IDX service provider. (IDX service is an intermediary service between the raw data MLS feed and a realtors website)

The IDX service provider told our client there was no point in having indexable listings on his real estate website as Google was going to stop indexing these listings. The client should instead use the listings on their own domain, and use Google AdWords to drive traffic to their site

In a way this makes sense. Yet the idea raises more questions than it answers.

CartPress Sends no-cache Headers

WordPress Plugin News Feed Stops Website Caching

It’s hard to believe a simple news feed from the CartPress e-commerce plugin for WordPress prevents WordPress from caching pages. This is apparently what happened to a website recently.

We received a request for assistance for a WordPress e-commerce site with this problem. The owner read our article; Fastest WordPress Caching System – and asked if we thought it would overcome a problem with his site. We explained this system wasn’t suitable for e-commerce.