Hi Reader,

First, some of you may have heard about the Google algorithm leak this week. In short, an automated bot called yoshi-code-bot has leaked 2,500 documents detailing exactly how the Google algorithm ranks websites and displays them in search results. Google has been very closely guarding this information, so all of my web forums are seriously blowing up in response.

I've got my hands on the details and there's a ton of data to sift through. I'll have some key findings to report next month. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, here's your May care plan overview.

Maintenance issue of the month:

The website page builder, Elementor has had another (sigh) major vulnerability this month. Tim and I quickly implemented updates on all Elementor sites, and no Studio Clvr clients have been negatively affected.

Hot topic of the month
Robots v humans & the fight against spam

This month, one of our clients noticed some false negatives from their spam-prevention software. The last thing any business wants is for a potential client to be turned away, especially in a manner where they are told that they are 'suspicious'. Not great.

I've been down a spam rabbit hole to investigate what's happening. Here's an overview of my thinking on spam and how to fight it, balanced with making sure everyone who wants to buy from you online can actually do so.

Robots: 0

One of the first things clients ask for when we push a new website live is to please, for the love of tacos, get all these robots out of my inbox! There are a bunch of spam-prevention tools we use to block spam. We usually use several of these in combination to fight those robots:

• Captchas are online tests that check if you're human. We use Google ReCaptcha for clients who are already all in with Google Analytics and we use privacy-focussed hCaptcha or Friendly Captcha for clients who are more protective of their visitor data.
• Honeypots: we use these on all of our forms. Honeypots are like little tricks to make the robots reveal themselves. As soon as they fall for it, they're automatically booted. Another cool thing about honeypots is that they force the spam bots to waste time and act as a deterrent from continuing...in theory...
• Gravity Forms Zero Spam: this is a tool from our form software provider that goes beyond captcha and honeypot to detect both robot and human-generated spam.

Humans: 1 — mostly

All of these tools are clearly winning when it comes to blocking robots. So that's awesome to keep bot spam out of your inbox. Score 1 for the humans!

But what about human-generated spam? Anyone been contacted via a website form by spammer promising to fix your SEO? That sort of human-generated spam is becoming more prevalent and spam-prevention software captures tons of it. We've tried a few different tools for this, including CleanTalk, the problem plugin flagging false-negatives for our client. I've found—down that rabbit hole— that this issue is not exclusive to CleanTalk, all the major anti-spam tools suffer from similar problems, and I wouldn't be confident in saying that Gravity Forms Zero Spam is a guarantee for perfection here either.

Part of what you're paying for with tools like CleanTalk is access to their database, where they are blacklisting loads of human spammers and auto-blocking them from access to you. But their block rules can also be very strict and occasionally mark legit users as spam. Working out the difference between a genuine human enquiry from someone who wants to buy from you and an enquiry from someone who wants to sell to you is a delicate task that the software is still learning to differentiate. Sometimes it gets it wrong.

If you're worried about this, consider checking your spam logs or get us to check them for you. We always do this when we first set spam up for clients to ensure that everything is functioning properly and to whitelist initial false negatives to teach the system about your trusted users. This has historically been the standard operating procedure for web agencies, with the ongoing logs only used to check for issues if they arise.

Regularly trawling through spam logs is a time-consuming activity with little ROI for clients, so we haven't included this in our care plans to keep the cost down for you. However, if anyone would like us to keep an eye out for false positives, we can include this service as an add-on to your care plan.

Reply to this email if you want more info specific to your business.

Monthly maintenance reminders:

Download your backup if you've been advised to do so previously

Daily backups of your website are saved for 30 days in your Flywheel account. We also save weekly offline backups of all websites on a Clever Care plan—most of you don't need to worry about downloading your backup as we're doing that for you.

For clients with large sites on servers outside of Australia (where the backup download is very slow from Sydney), we recommend that you regularly save a copy of the latest Flywheel backup to your server as a 'just in case' for use in the rare event that the server fails. Access your backups here: https://app.getflywheel.com and navigate to Backups. Note that these monthly backups are for the latest version of the live site (not staging).
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​Remember to push staging to live to ensure all site changes are backed up! If you are working on the staging version of your website, we recommend that you push staging changes to live after every session to ensure all site changes are backed up (staging is not backed up).

Any questions?

Your Clever Care plan includes unlimited quick Q&A email support for questions I can answer without opening your website and 15-min/month for questions that need me to open your website or compile a bunch of info. Shoot through a reply if you need anything.

If you need more than 15 minutes, Hourly Packs are back! I haven't officially launched these as a product yet, but they're already proving a huge hit and I honestly can't remember why I stopped doing them a few years back!

Hourly bulk packs make it easier for you to book ad-hoc dev time when you need it. 10 and 20-hour packs are valid for 1 year from the date of purchase and are timed in 15-minute increments—perfect for all those little things you need help with without waiting until you have enough tasks for a full Clever Day. Pricing info for bulk packs here or shoot me an email.

Chat soon,

Nic

Need some clever strategy help? Or someone to smash through your design and website tasks? A Clever Day might be just the ticket to moving your business forward! Clever, straight-up strategy and list-smashing day work for quick wins.

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