Internet Webmaster Help | FidoSysop Archive

Jetpack 4.3 Removes Stats From WordPress Dashboard

09/09/201601/16/2017 FidoSysop

After upgrading WordPress Jetpack Plugin to version 4.3 we noticed stats were missing from our WordPress dashboard. To get your stats, logging into WordPress.com is now required. Update 09/27/16 Jetpack is now history. See update below this post. WordPress stats are adequate for a quick view into the days visitors, popular posts, etc. It was real handy to have WordPress Stats in WP-Admin sidebar menu, but after version 4.3 that option is gone. When going to > Jetpack > Dashboard > a short graph is available. Currently the view old…

HTTP 410 Gone Code Stops Search Engines Re-Crawling Dead Urls

09/03/201611/05/2017 FidoSysop

Here is how to use HTTP 410 GONE status code to tell search engines those 404 urls they keep re-crawling over and over again have been permanently removed and will never be back. If your website or blog is quite old, chances are you have removed posts, added and removed categories, tags, and media attachments over the years. Google crawls your whole website. This includes your JavaScript, CSS files, Plugins, on top of your posts, pages, tags, categories, etc, etc, etc. Jokers redirecting a url to your domain also redirects…

Google AMP Mobile Search Preview: AMP’ed Results In Search

08/22/201601/16/2017 FidoSysop

AMP Mobile Page Specific Search Preview is now available from Google. Previously AMP search results targeted only major news and other top stories sites on the net. But sites / blogs like yours and mine will soon be showing up in Google mobile device searches. Here’s how to opt into AMP Search. From Googles blog post on the subject: It’s 2016 and it’s hard to believe that browsing the web on a mobile phone can still feel so slow with users abandoning sites that just don’t load quickly. To us…

WP Fastest Cache For WordPress Using CloudFlare

07/04/201601/29/2018 FidoSysop

WP Fastest Cache is Doc’s recommended plugin for WordPress when using CloudFlare. Despite the increased speed CloudFlare gives your site, WordPress still has to generate each page dynamically. Above average visitor load can cause database connection timeouts. And even get your site shut down if on shared hosting. You can gain a ton more website speed by caching your posts, pages, tags, and categories. When caching your site a generated html page is delivered to your site visitor. This saves WordPress from doing all the work saving bandwidth and server…

Facebook Embedded Media Blocked By Robots Noindex

06/11/201601/16/2017 FidoSysop

Facebook Embedded Video Blocked By Robots.txt File

Embedding Facebook Media or Video in your blog posts? We discovered today that those embedded media items come with meta robots.txt block. This meta robots block will greatly effect your overall post seo score. Updated 12/13/16: Facebook embedded Website Comments also comes with an undisclosed robots block. What Facebook is saying: You can use this resource to display on your site, but we block any seo advantage to using it. Just like all external Facebook links are meta nofollow. This means putting a link to your website or blog will…

Optimizing WordPress Using CloudFlare Security and Encryption

05/26/201610/04/2018 FidoSysop

Optimizing WordPress SimplePress running under CloudFlare

CloudFlare is the best resource on the net to Protect and Enhance WordPress Installations. This also goes for the popular WordPress Forum Plugin SimplePress. In this article i am going to show how to get the most from CloudFlare’s FREE plan and tweaking WordPress and SimplePress for best results. Getting started: CloudFlare offers an incredible package even on their free plan. It’s rather easy to set up your domain. First go to CloudFlare.com and register your account. After registering scan your domain to add it to cf dns. This process…

PHP MBstring May Need Enabling In WordPress Installations

04/16/201612/15/2017 FidoSysop

PHP MBstring May Be Required In Certain WordPress Configurations

PHP Multibyte String often referred to as MBstring may not be enabled in many common php configurations, but may be needed in certain WordPress configurations, dependent on certain plugin use. We ran into this after upgrading to WordPress 4.5. Our self administrated server did not have this php module installed. This article shows how to enable this module in WHM / cPanel servers using easy Apache. From php.net: When you manipulate (trim, split, splice, etc.) strings encoded in a multibyte encoding, you need to use special functions since two or…

CloudFlare WordPress Plugin Disaster Breaks Admin Functions

03/29/201601/16/2017 FidoSysop

CloudFlare WordPress Plugin Breaks WP-Admin

CloudFlare WordPress Plugin Disaster Breaks WordPress Admin Functions – And CloudFlare Support Was Clueless! This morning i couldn’t log in to this WordPress blog. It was the start of several hours of hell trying to diagnose the problem. CloudFlare had a major security issue – and what they did to fix it was beyond logic! I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong while having my morning coffee. I suspected a CloudFlare debacle right off the bat since i had updated their plugin last night before going…

Google AMP Validation Errors Under CloudFlare Easy Fix

03/24/201609/26/2018 FidoSysop

Google AMP Validation Errors And CloudFlare Incompatibility

Recently we enabled Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and since then are dealing with multiple Validation Errors. Automattic (WordPress) has a plugin that generates the required compatible pages, and Yoast has came out with a Glue plugin that adds a few items Automattic’s Plugin leaves out. But Google has outlawed Script commands that seem to be the greatest majority of our amp validation errors. We are running under a CloudFlare pro-account, their main script that loads CloudFlare performance options, (Mirage, Polish, Email Obfuscation, Rocket Loader, etc) is outlawed by Google…

Why Donald Trump’s Campaign Website Is The Best Online!

03/09/201612/15/2017 FidoSysop

An article published on slate.com explains why Donald Trump’s Political Website is the best. A tribute to Mr. Trumps Webmaster and his political campaign team, that has excellent communication skills! 😉 I have watched Mr. Trumps website grow almost daily as more navigation links and important information has been added. Speed and Security is of utmost importance these days, and donaldjtrump.com is running under https/tls security, and is protected against cyber attacks by cloudflare.com the same service used on this blog. The article talks about political websites: Presidential campaign websites…

OfferUp The FREE Craigslist Car Dealer Classified Alternative

10/06/201505/08/2019 FidoSysop

Craigslist is charging auto dealers a flat $5 per car listing fee to advertise their used cars on it’s platform. Considering Craigslist used to be free has many car dealers fuming! But here is something new that might work out better than Craigslist for car dealers. OfferUp is something you car dealers should try out. Everything these days is turning to mobile devices. OfferUp is an app available for both Android and Apple platforms and is definitely worth giving a shot. Update 03/22/17: Fraudsters are offering cars for sale at…

Google Chrome Cleanup / Software Reporter Tool HIGH CPU

09/11/201501/16/2017 FidoSysop

Google Chrome Cleanup / Software Reporter Tool “software_reporter_tool.exe” Was running multiple processes (12 to be exact) and pegging my CPU usage meter. I found this out by bringing up my task manager and observed the multiple processes running. Killing one or more services just popped up more. The name in my process manager is “Chrome Cleanup Tool.” The system fan was whirling like mad trying to cool my CPU down. Thinking id be cute – i deleted that sucker.. Walla.. 😆 But wouldn’t you know.. chrome cleanup tool came right…

Auto Dealer Social Media Marketing Network Setup Specialist

08/29/201505/08/2019 FidoSysop

Auto Dealer SEO and Social Media Specialist

Car Dealers – Are you taking advantage of social media marketing? If you are not posting your inventory to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, you are losing out on lots of car sales! Now more than ever car buyers are using smartphones to search social media for cars for sale within their area. Let me set your social media networks up and make it super easy to share your cars to three social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus) with a single click. It works like this. When you add…

Removing Open Graph Output On WordPress Pages

06/10/201501/16/2017 FidoSysop

Are you using SimplePress the WordPress forum plugin? If so chances are open graph default page data is preventing properly sharing simple press forum posts. There are times when open graph tags output need to be removed from WordPress pages. Using Simple Press WordPress forum is one of them. One example is if you are using a plugin for a forum or other task that does not support open graph. In this case i am using SimplePress forums that are a WordPress plugin. The reason to remove open graph output…

WordPress 4.2 Adds Emoji Support That Breaks Smileys

04/25/201511/05/2017 FidoSysop

wordpress 4.2 emoji breaks smiley shortcodes

Received a WordPress 4.2 update notification when logging into my admin As usual i hit the update button and WordPress 4.2 was installed without a hitch, or at least i thought so. Using Firefox browser i switched to my blog’s front end. On the home page i saw a light gray emoji where a yellow wink smiley once was. Using Google chrome browser a tiny black X can be seen where my wink smiley once was. Internet Explorer displays the light gray emoji the same as Firefox. Not knowing what…

Google Adds New Security Feature To Chrome Browser

03/05/201501/16/2017 FidoSysop

Google is making it more difficult to accidentally download harmful software Google has added a new warning to Chrome that pops up before users visit a site that will encourage downloads of unwanted software. The red warning, pictured above, lets readers know that the site they’re about to visit a website that “might attempt to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience” by, for example, switching your homepage or injecting extra ads on your screen. Chrome already has a warning that pops up once a software download…

Blackholing Spam Notifications Prevents IP Blacklisting

01/20/201512/15/2017 FidoSysop

How to prevent your server / hosting IP being blacklisted by spammers! Your default inbox is probably full of spam without your knowledge! When a spammer sends a blind email ([email protected]) to your domain the server sends a bounce notification to the reply to address in the spam email. That’s a major problem! Here’s how to fix it. A client recently was getting bounce messages from AOL who blacklisted the sending IP address. To make a long story somewhat short. A spammer had used a forged mail from and reply…

OVH Networks King Of SPAM Bots

01/19/201512/15/2017 FidoSysop

When it comes to Spam and I’m not talking about the kind that comes in a can. In my personal opinion OVH Networks is the king of spam. I see their IPs in my logs each day. Tweet a blog post and here they come rushing over to attack your posts. OVH spam used to mostly come from France. But over the past few months a flood of their bots have been seen coming from Canada. They are using IP’s that resolve to “ns502708.ip-198-245-51.net” and so on. Since I’m running…

WordPress HTTP & HTTPS Via This Protocol Relative Mod

01/18/201511/05/2017 FidoSysop

Are you ready to go https with your WordPress blog? Here is a neat trick that will allow your blog to accept both HTTP and HTTPS using Protocol Relative with no insecure page errors. Ive been running WordPress for many years and recently made the jump to TLS Encryption by using CloudFlare Free https. CloudFlare and many others have disabled SSL because of a security vulnerability. The latest encryption protocol is “transport layer security” (TLS.) The disadvantage of this is, many older browsers do not support it and will not…

Your Business Domain Name Shouldn’t Be Registered By Another

01/17/201512/15/2017 FidoSysop

How many of you own your domain name? Meaning are you in control of your domain another company or service registered for you? If that management company goes out of business you could be stuck like Chuck. While updating a site for a client recently we discovered the domain was registered in another companies name. A scenario like this can become a major nightmare if the person that initially registered your domain name becomes unreachable. Death of registrant, out of business, etc. If your business domain is registered in another…