Archive: August 2021

We enjoy using WordPress because it is so friendly with Search Engines; however, what if you have a page you want public but not indexed? There are a number of ways to do this and adding a code to a “header.php” file in your child-theme, but this gets messy. The plug-ins we used in the past are no longer in development. Well everything we needed to achieve this was already installed and it is in Yoast SEO.

• In the Admin section go to the page you want to block.
• Expand the Yoast SEO tab.
  

• Go down to Advanced and expand it.
  

• In the “Allow search engines to show this Post in search results?” set this to “NO“, and the “Should search engines follow links on this Post” to “No“
  

If you look at the source code of the page you will see the meta data for indexing is set to NOT INDEX.

Let us know if this helped you…

We worked on improving the SEO of a page, so when we were finished we removed the old URL and submitted the new one. This was a mistake. We would recommended waiting till the new page has been indexed before removing the old page. The reason for this is that critical page was not indexed at all for a month. The reason for this was there was an error on the page that we didn’t notice Google was warning us. This was on the URL Inspection page.

We overlooked the text stating “because of an error.”, and we keep hitting the “Request Indexing” button. After a few weeks the page never got indexed. We decided to click on the “TEST LIVE URL” button. When we did this we got a completely different screen saying the page is available for indexing. Once it was done we now see this page.

Finally got things moving forward. We are looking forward to seeing new results.

Let us know if this helped you…

DIVI is fun to work with, and the latest update has greatly improved the load times on your pages. We took a DIVI site and ran it through Google’s Page Insights. Our initial numbers were so-so. We need to improve a few things. We don’t like page score below 80 on Desktop and 40 on Mobile. Our first run without the DIVI update gave us the following numbers.

We deleted out the cache and installed the DIVI update, and that one change made a big difference.

Not a huge change, but what an improvement! With Google putting more weight into Mobile-first indexing this is a huge help. If you are running a DIVI site and haven’t updated you should do it, and use Page Insights to measure the difference. We think you will be please.

Let us know if this helps you.

We try to stay on top of the 3 major Content Management Systems of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. This week was a big announcement from Joomla that version 4 is ready. We took a copy of a Joomla 3.9.28 and installed it in a XXAMP environment. We set the Joomla Update “options” in the “next” from the “default” and was prompted to upgrade straight to version 4. This would skip version 3.10. We went for it and it failed at the end of the update. Site was broken at that point. We are suggesting holding off from upgrading to version 4 at this moment.

We tried going from 3.9.28 to 3.10 and everything worked fine. We knew our Gantry 5 template wasn’t Joomla 4 ready, so we switched our templates to Protostar, and tried to got to version 4. The upgrade failed at this as well. We tried disabling most of the plug-ins we installed and this didn’t help. RocketThemes the maker of Gantry offers upgraded pieces you can replace your existing Gantry template to be Joomla 4 ready. We are going to try these and see if this helps. We hope to have an update for you. Here is the link to their GIT page with this information.

https://github.com/gantry/gantry5/blob/feature/v5.5.0/Joomla4-support.md

Although we haven’t spent much time on this effort yet we would advise before you upgrade test the site locally first. At this time we are advising against upgrading to Joomla 4 at this time.

Let us know if this helped you…

While typing up a contract we noticed Word put a red squiggly line under the word “subcontractor“. We looked to see what was wrong and Word was suggesting a french spelling of the word. The word “subcontractor” was throughout the document; however, it didn’t have a problem with those, just the ones on this one page. We fixed this by doing the following:

• Go to the “Review” tab
• Click on the “Language” button
• Choose “Set Proofing Language“.
• Select your Language preference, and check the box “Detect Language automatically“.

Let us know if this helped you…