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We read a while back that Google doesn’t like to index redirects, and well we were wrong. There are circumstances where Google doesn’t mind. We were removing URL‘s in the Search Console to have the cleanest index possible. Now we are going to keep the old URL of page and redirect the user once they get to the old URL. Here is a link to Google’s article.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects

This is important to your Search Engine Optimization due to you never know when the new URL will be crawled. We waited 3 months for one of our pages to get indexed, and this is after submitting a request in the search console. We had removed the old URL in the search console, so that page wasn’t indexed for 3 months. It was a page dedicated for one of our main services.

The big take away is don’t remove pages from Google’s index if the page is valuable to you. Use a 301 redirect instead. This will not hurt your site’s performance. AHREFS shows if the page isn’t found an alternative page could be. In our case the page was for Data Cabling and the About Us page was the closest alternative.

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One of our clients received an outstanding Google review; however, the review isn’t showing up. The person who left the review sent us a screenshot of the review and everything looks legit. We decided to contact Google for help to find the missing review. Here is the link to the best place to start.

https://support.google.com/business

We went through the process and got the the screen where we choose “Email” and then had to fill out specifics. Everything was straightforward till we got to finding the business profile ID. Next to the field was a link to find the business ID. It lead us to this page.

https://support.google.com/business/answer/10737668?p=search_settings&visit_id=637638599359412390-3685305854&rd=1&dark=0&authuser=1

Go to your Google My Business Listing for this business to edit the listing. One way to get there is to type in the exact name of the business the way it shows in the Google My Business listing.

Once you get the page to manage the listing click on the 3-Dot Hamburger menu to get to “Business Profile Settings“. Here you find the ID. We also found this ID while hovering over the business listing and in the URL preview at the bottom of the browser window you will see and need to write down this number. We blocked out the number but it will be where the red circle is.

We heard back from Google that review may violate one of their guidelines. The reviews go through an automated process, so support can’t see the review to be able to tell you what is wrong. Here is link to their guidelines.

https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114?hl=en#zippy=

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Last week while developing a new site in Joomla 4 we got a bunch of text in the header that had “#Language.TextToSpeech” and other text in this section above the page. We did a Google search and found nothing. We started over again with a back up, so we didn’t loose anything. It still bothered us to what went wrong. There was a new update available to take us from 4.2.2 to 4.2.3. This update resolved the issue we had with the original site. We would still like to know what went wrong.

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We have setup WooCommerce, Virtuemart, and a couple of other eCommerce sites. While working on another WooCommerce setup and testing the store the orders coming in said “My WordPress” as the sender. We were busy with the setup so didn’t get around to fixing till today. It took us a minute to find our answer which was easy to find. In case you need help here is where you find this setting.

Go to WooCommerce >> Settings >> Email (tab) >> Email sender options

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We are setting up a new site on Siteground’s hosting, and after we log into our WooCommerce install and try to get to the home page we get this error. We found an article on Siteground’s site to help us understand the issue, and we will post the link below. We wanted to document what we needed to do to resolve the issue.

https://my.siteground.com/support/kb/too-many-redirects/

This site is on Siteground’s staging server, and we were not sure if the staging part had something to do with it. The first thing the article suggest is disabling plugins. We did this but couldn’t locate the issue. This is partly due to the Server-side caching that SiteGround provides. We located the caching under the “Speed” tab.

We needed to disable each plugin, delete the server cache, delete the browser cache, and then login to site and try to get back to the home page. This was a huge help. We found that “Ultimate Membership” plug-in was our culprit. We found “content control” plug-in worked the best for limiting access to pages until user logs in.

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While building a new site in Joomla 4 our RSS Feeds showed “Feed not found“. This happened after we upgraded to 4.2. We contacted Joomla and they are aware of the issue. They said this will be a bug fix in the next release or 4.2.1. Meanwhile it is hard to work on site that has something broken on each page. Until the update is released we did the following to fix the issue.

We had an Akeeba backup from before the 4.2 upgrade. We installed this site locally and moved the following files over into the site we are working on. Here are the files and their location.

• AtomParser.php – \libraries\src\Feed\Parser
• RssParser.php – \libraries\src\Feed\Parser

We copied these two files from the restored backup to the new site and everything was working the way it should.

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We were uploading some videos into the Media section of a customers website when we got the error “Unexpected response from the server. The file may have been uploaded successfully. Check in the Media Library or reload the page.” We uploaded 5 videos and only 3 uploaded. The other two had an error. These two videos where 30 megabytes each and the Media Library had a limit of 40 megabytes, so it should have uploaded.

File size seemed to be the issue, but we didn’t have access to the CPanel yet to change the PHP.ini file. We were working localhost, and were able to add some PHP code to our Functions.php file in the our child theme. This didn’t solve the issue. Our upload limit in the media library upload say we can do up to 256 megabytes now.

We cleared the cache, and still had the issue. We found something on StackExchange that mentioned the “Security” plugin.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59915558/wordpress-unexpected-response-from-the-server-the-file-may-have-been-uploaded

We disabled the Security plugin, and we were able to upload the videos. We turned the Security back on, and we could still upload.

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We had a customer getting 30ish spammed emails from their website each day, but it wasn’t coming from the website. We handle their website and email so by looking into the back-end of the website we could see there were no form submissions. This meant it was spoofed to seem like it was coming from the site.

We needed something to use to block these emails. The customer forwarded a couple of the emails so we could look at the internet headers. Opened the email in Outlook and then went to File >> Properties.

Scrolling through the header we found the offending email address “krates@host.pcmdns.com“, the IP address and domain.

We went into their Office365 online account and went to the Admin >> Show All >> Security.

This will take to you https://security.microsoft.com. Once there you will click on “Policies & rules” >> Threat policies >> Anti-spam.

Once there to block the IP we went to Connection filter policy (Default) >> Edit connection filter policy.

Enter the IP address you want to block and hit “save”. Make sure it did save. We had to do this a couple of times before the IP showed in our policy list.

We also created a separate policy to handle the email address. Start with clicking on the “Create policy” >> “Inbound“. In the Users section add the email addresses you want to protect. We didn’t add any groups. We put their “their-domain.com” and “microsoft.their-domain.com” for the Domains section. For the Action we sent the emails to the junk folder. In the “Allow & block list” we added the offending email address.

Microsoft documentation was a little outdated, but helped us. We found that information here.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/configure-the-connection-filter-policy?view=o365-worldwide

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We received a invoice today from Domain Networks to renew our main domain SCDIT.com. Problem with this invoice is our domain is not with Domain Networks. They want $285.00 to renew for another year. Domains do not cost that much. If you or someone you know gets a letter/invoice from Domain Networks it is a scam.

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