WordPress Performance Issue?

Just wanted to share a mysterious trend reported for my sites by Google Webmaster Tools, and ask if anyone else is seeing the same pattern. It looks like it’s related to the WordPress 4.4 update, but I’m not 100% sure, so putting the data out there in hopes that others can help shed some light on the issue.. Continue reading »

Example of a Spoofed Search Engine Bot

While solving the recent search engine spoofing mystery, I came across two excellent examples of spoofed search engine bots. This article uses the examples to explain how to identify any questionable bots hitting your site. Continue reading »

Analyzing Weird 404 Search Engine Requests

Lately I’ve been getting a significant number of really weird 404 requests for one of my sites. At first I ignored them. Then upon closer inspection, I realized that the requests were reporting user agents like Googlebot, Bingbot, and other top search engines. So there was cause for concern. You don’t want legitimate search engines tripping over endless 404 requests that are completely unrelated to your site content. That gets into “negative SEO” territory, and should be investigated and resolved […] Continue reading »

List of All User Agents for Top Search Engines

Here is a working list of all user agents for the major, top search engines. I use this information frequently for my plugins such as Blackhole for Bad Bots and BBQ Pro, so I figured it would be useful to post the information online for the benefit of others. Having the user agents for these popular bots all in one place helps to streamline my development process. Each search engine includes references and a regex pattern to match all known […] Continue reading »

Integrating Google No Captcha reCaptcha In WordPress Forms

In this tutorial you will learn how to integrate Google’s new reCatcha model in WordPress Login, Comment, Registration and Lost Password Forms. Continue reading »

Add Google+ Share Button to Any Site

g+ Share button Word on the streets is that the new Google+ Share button is the best way yet to benefit from Google’s myriad social-media services and all-important search-engine. And Google makes it SO easy to add the new Share button to your website. This article explains what it is, where it fits in with all the other social-Google stuff, and of course how to add the g+ Share button to any site. Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: GA Google Analytics

I’ve joked that there a million different Google Analytics WordPress plugins available, but I’ve never been able to find one that’s just dead-simple, plug-n-play, and with clean code and markup, so I wrote my own that does just that: a no-frills way to add the new Google Analytics asynchronous tracking code to all pages on your WordPress-powered site. This analytics plugin is lightweight, fast, and now has over 50,000 80,000 active users via WordPress.org. Continue reading »

Multiple Sitemaps

Yes you can have multiple sitemaps for your site. Create the sitemaps you need, and then specify them in your robots.txt file. For example, here are the robots.txt directives for the two sitemaps used here at Perishable Press: Continue reading »

Hacked by Google?

The setup: I recently launched a new plugin that included a Demo page. To keep things flexible, I set up the Demo as a page on my experimental “Labs” WordPress installation, which is entirely nofollow, noindex and noarchive, meaning that Google can’t legitimately see what’s there. Continue reading »

Clean Up Malicious Links with HTAccess

I recently spent some time analyzing Perishable Press pages as they appear in the search results for Google, Bing, et al. Google Webmaster Tools provides a wealth of information about crawl errors, as well as the URLs of any pages that link to missing content. Combined with your site’s access/error logs, you have everything needed to track down 404 errors and clean up your listings in the search engine results. Continue reading »

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