If we have designed your website and it is currently hosted with us, then there are some website updates we want to make you aware of!  We are making some game-changing updates to websites to make them more secure and to ensure that search engines love your website even more than they do now.  I have divided these update notes into three primary categories. This will explain about all of the changes we are making and why.

SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) WEBSITE UPDATES:

Google has made some serious changes to their ranking algorithms in the past few months.   For some customers, you may have noticed some search traffic decline and many people are experiencing this.  This is because of a few SEO optimizations that are now becoming mandatory that once were optional. Some of which were not even heard of a few years ago.  Some of these issues have to do with Open Graph.  What is Open Graph?  Open Graph is meta data stored in your website that allows social media sites to display snippets of your website in a neat and formatted card.  Google used to out-right ignore Open Graph meta, but not any more.  Google is now looking at the whole of your website for quality content which now includes Open Graph meta among others.

Another issue is focus keywords.  This is something rather new on the SEO stage that Google bit a hold of and is now weighing very heavily.  This means we’re going to have to go through most of our customer’s web pages and ensure that there are focus keywords on every page.  Websites designed within the past 8 months already have these and need not worry.  We will be retroactively fitting older websites.

We are also using a new technology to help you and us to better place keywords on your website.  This is a library plugin that helps you to better research keywords for your content while you type.  This is going to be one of the most singular tools that will help your website score big on the search engines if you use it!

So what does this mean?  This means all of our customers should prepare for a flood of traffic.

SECURITY WEBSITE UPDATES

We are changing the WordPress Security Software that we have been running to a new, cloud-based security software.  This helps to harden WordPress even further than Cloudflare does.  This security software runs all query strings through its cloud database to ensure that the strings aren’t harmful.  It even evaluates Cross-Site Scripting strings as well.  This allows for your site to connect to others without having to disable the entire feature.  This software will also evaluate uploads for malicious content, especially attack scripts.  We have a lot of confidence in our previous security, but we prepare for the worst while hoping for the best.  While this doesn’t prevent your site from being compromised, it does prevent malicious actions once it is.

We have also installed a WordPress oriented firewall between our server and the internet.  This firewall only allows connections from CloudFlare and examines all of the traffic to ensure that it is not harmful to the website.  It also checks for logins to ensure no one is trying to break in or guess your passwords.   But that’s not all, it will examine all forms on a website to ensure they’re not being spammed in any way.  And, it blocks most cross-scripting attacks by default.

We have tested this software on our own website and 22 other customers who have volunteered for the beta testing.  Over the past three months we have seen zero issues, however that is not to say it will not cause issues in the future.  If you find that your website is acting stranger than normal, you should open a trouble ticket and let us know.

PRIVACY WEBSITE UPDATES

I bet you’re sick of hearing about this.  Everyone seems to be updating their privacy policy.  But we’re a little different.  Goldsboro Web Development has ALWAYS been as clear and as transparent as possible in our privacy policy.  If we don’t share your information, we mean it.  Most of the problems we have been seeing online stems from data sharing.  Being we don’t share your data, there is nothing to change.