An advisory has been issued about a high-severity WordPress vulnerability that makes it possible for attackers to inject arbitrary shortcodes into sites using the WordPress Popular Posts plugin. Attackers do not need a user account to launch an attack. WordPress Popular Posts is installed in over 100,000 websites enables websites to display the most popular […]
A high severity vulnerability in a popular WordPress backup plugin allows unauthenticated attackers to exploit the flaw. The vulnerability is rated 8.8 on a scale of 0.0 to 10. UpdraftPlus: WP Backup & Migration Plugin The vulnerability affects the popular Updraft Plus WordPress plugin, installed in over 3 million websites. Updraft Plus comes in a […]
SearchNorwich recently published an excellent video featuring Google’s Martin Splitt discussing how to debug crawling and indexing issues related to JavaScript, saying that most of the times it’s not JavaScript that’s causing indexing issues, the actual cause is something else. Even if you don’t know how to code with JavaScript, the tips that Martin shares […]
A discrepancy emerged between Google’s official stance on API-based placement exclusions and real-world observations, particularly for Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. The contradiction: Google claims API-based placement exclusions don’t work for PMax Multiple advertisers report successful API-based exclusions UI-based exclusions function as expected The inconsistency between Google’s stated policy and actual functionality creates uncertainty for advertisers […]
OpenAI published an incident report detailing the cause of last weeks ChatGPT outage and what they are doing to prevent a repeat. The outage began on December 26th, 2024 at 10:40 AM and was mostly resolved by 3:11 PM, except for except ChatGPT which was 100% recovered by 6:20 PM. The following services were impacted: […]
The less a person says to communicate, the better. Shakespeare said “Brevity is the soul of wit.” And in just six words, underlined why brevity impacts communication. I appreciate brevity in all things. Iconic one-liners work for punny slogans, catchy choruses, witty retorts, and more. But think about how true this is for social media. […]
At the beginning of 2002, there were more than a dozen “search engines,” including crawlers, directories, and paid/PPC/CPC engines. But by the end of that year, Google had emerged from the pack to become the leading player. (According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Google had a 39% share of 47 million “search hours” in December 2002.1) I recently […]
Google Ads is preparing for what executives call a “seismic shift” in consumer search behavior, with AI playing a central role in transforming how users discover information and interact with businesses. The transformation represents a bigger change than the mobile revolution, according to Brendon Kraham, VP of global search ads and commerce, signaling a fundamental […]
Google’s recent Search Off the Record podcast touched on the issue of SEO expertise and the disconnect between how SEOs think Google ranks websites how Googlers understand it. The disparity is so great that Gary Ilyes remarked that sometimes he doesn’t know what SEOs are talking about. Google: SEO Gurus’ Questions “Don’t Make Sense” Martin […]
A recent discussion among the Google Search Relations team highlights a challenge in web development: getting JavaScript to work well with modern search tools. In Google’s latest Search Off The Record podcast, the team discussed the rising use of JavaScript, and the tendency to use it when it’s not required. Martin Splitt, a Search Developer […]