a person holding a credit card and the other hand typing on a laptop

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) Update (13-Sept-2019)

You may have heard about Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), a new requirement under European payment law that, in part, aims to make online and mobile payments more secure. It does so by asking customers to provide additional information to complete their transactions.

While SCA will come into effect on 14 September 2019, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) recently announced it will take a phased approach to enforce SCA obligations over an 18-month period.

Chris Grant (he/him) 13th September 2019 12:52 pm

WordPress

WordPress plugins gone rogue – compromised plugins creating rogue administrator accounts

A recent malvertising campaign targeting vulnerable plugins is now trying to backdoor sites by creating rogue admin accounts.

Back in July when the campaign was first noticed it was attempting to hijack sites to push popup ads, tech support scams, and malicious Android apps.

Chris Grant (he/him) 5th September 2019 9:25 pm

WordPress

WordPress 5.3 will change how it blocks search engines from indexing content

WordPress announced an important change to how it will block search engines from indexing websites.

This change abandons the traditional Robots.txt solution in favor of the Robots Meta Tag approach. The change brings WordPress in line with the reason for blocking Google, which is to keep the blocked pages from showing in Google’s search results.

Chris Grant (he/him) 3rd September 2019 11:25 pm

SEO

Google is showing competitor ads on local business profiles (and you can’t do a thing about it)

Google has been slowly ramping local search monetisation over time. It introduced local search ads in early 2017, which put ads in local packs, and began putting ads in local Knowledge Panels roughly two years ago. Now, the company is starting to show competitor ads in local business profiles.

Chris Grant (he/him) 31st August 2019 9:53 pm

A desktop with a mouse, a pen, a mouse pad and a jar of pencils

Data and Analytics

1991 to 2019 – How many websites are there now?

Today we’ve got an infographic, showing the number of websites online since the very first one was created back in 1991. When Yahoo! came online in 1994, there were 3,000 websites while there were 2.4 million when Google was launched in 1998.

Tom Furmanski 20th August 2019 9:32 am

News

WordPress buys Tumblr for “less than $3m”, down from $1.1b in 2013

Sarah Krouse reports that Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is buying Tumblr from Verizon. Tumblr was (and still is for the most part) the blogging service of choice for millions of young people, but floundered after being sold to AOL Yahoo and subsequently cleansed of advertiser-unfriendly material (i.e. smut) when Yahoo was itself sold to Verizon.

Tom Furmanski 16th August 2019 1:16 pm

Code and Development

Redirect Old Domain to New Domain via .htaccess

When you migrate a site from one domain to another, it is very important that you don’t break all the links that you built to your old domain. Proper redirection of all the pages on the old domain to the same location on the new domain will ensure that visitors to the old domain will end up in the right place. A failure to redirect will result in a loss of visitors as well as search engine rankings.

Tom Furmanski 16th August 2019 10:08 am

Modern web network and internet telecommunication technology. Website programming code

WordPress

Malicious plugin found to be being used to encrypt WordPress posts

Recently a new customer came to us needing their website cleaned up after a hack, as part of the cleanup we found an interesting little malicious WordPress plugin, called “WP Security”, that was being used to encrypt blog post content. The website owner complained of a newly installed and activated plugin on their website that was rendering their original content unreadable.

Chris Grant (he/him) 14th August 2019 6:37 pm

Digital Marketing

Is your website homepage leaky?

Your home page is frequently the first web page someone engages with. It sets the tone for the rest of your website and is often a potential customer’s first impression of your company—and we all know first impressions matter.

Chris Grant (he/him) 9th August 2019 11:02 am

Blogging

Leading by example, some SEO & design changes to our blog

You may have noticed if you’re a regular visitor to the O’Brien Media Insider blog, that we’ve made some minor changes. All in the name of SEO (search engine optimisation) and usability. As some background, Google hates duplicate content, and while they make allowances for some duplicate content that is a natural byproduct of blogging it’s best to keep duplicates to a minimum‏.

Chris Grant (he/him) 4th August 2019 8:52 pm

The O’Brien Media Digital Insider Blog