Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Top tip: Use Google cache to browse a webpage that’s down

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Top tip: Use Google cache to browse a webpage that's down Wordpress SEO ExpertI spent ten minutes this morning waiting for a page to load, before remembering about Google cache.

Google cache’s sites when it indexes them, meaning if you want to look at a page that doesn’t change all that often, you can easily take a look if the original site is down/slow to load.

It’s really easy. Simply add the URL you want to access (including the http://) after this:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:

So, for example: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com will return the latest cached version of my homepage.

Easy, and useful!

Removing the “admin” vulnerability from your WordPress website

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Here are instructions for securing your WordPress website—to remove the “admin” user which is currently the target of botnet hacker attacks.

(More information on the attack is below the video).

Basically a large network of “zombie”, or “botnet” computers is being used to find WordPress sites, and then try thousands of passwords to gain access as the “admin” user. Now, since the default setting for all WordPress sites is to have an “admin” user, this attack is going to affect a lot of people.

WordPress has been attacked by a botnet of “tens of thousands” of individual computers since last week, according to server hosters Cloudflare and Hostgator.

The botnet targets WordPress users with the username “admin”, trying thousands of possible passwords.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22152296

Drop box URL shortening

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Just a very quick tip. Dropbox is a useful tool for sharing large files, I use it with my client’s quite a bit.

One thing I do not like is the length of the URL it gives you to share, they can be longer than the average length of a line of email text, spaces in file names become %20, and honestly long URL links are just plain ugly.

Fortunately, Dropbox creates shortened URLs for you, they just don’t show you where they are! Basically if you opt to share the file link via Twitter, you’ll see the short version, which you can email or share in other ways too.

Just to make it really clear, here’s a short video I made showing how it’s done.

Helpful tip? Please donate: 1JbTZppFMnK6XW4cw2f1iYMvofJaUy7cjz

Facebook Pages, and just how big to make those pesky cover and profile pictures

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This website may have been written when the new Pages system and layouts were first launched, but it’s still very valid and useful.

It contacts all the information about the picture sizes you need, and a few extra helpful tips besides.

http://www.marketinggum.com/facebook-timeline-upgrade-sizes-faqs-how-to

Do bear in mind though, even though your Facebook Page’s profile picture needs to be 180 pixels square, Facebook actually automatically crops out 10 pixels on all four sides. So basically, create an image that’s 180px, but know that you’ll lose a bit around the edges.

Of course, you can also have me do this for you, I make a lot of these for people! In fact, I’ve done over 100 in the past 12 months.

I can design your facebook page for you.

How I work #2

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Last year I wrote about my penchant for designing everything from logos to databases and scripts on the back of envelopes.

My final sentence read, “How do you work? Scribbles? Itemised lists? Walls of Post-it notes?”

Well, the last item in that list isn’t just plucked from the top of my head—I love walls of post-it notes.

Often I’m asked to take a look at my clients’ site structure, to see if their menu is really working from a user experience perspective.

Below you can see one I worked on this morning, both the before and after shot. As it was, almost all their pages came under one top level heading, which meant most of their visitors’ interactions were going to be done under one sub-heading, while the rest of the menu was underused.

By sticking some Post-it notes on my wall I could easily rearrange it all so information is more evenly distributed, while also merging a couple of the original top level items so the content of each menu is obvious at a glance.

But this case-study aside, I’m always interested to see how people (including myself) best organise and plan in the physical world, before transferring that information to the digital.

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