Welcome to the O’Brien Media Insider – Your Go-To for Digital Insights and Business Know-How
The O’Brien Media Insider is your behind-the-scenes look at all things digital, creative, and business-focused. From web design trends and SEO tips to small business insights and local Swindon highlights, our blog covers a bit of everything – just like we do at O’Brien Media.
Whether you’re a client, collaborator, or curious visitor, this is the place to catch up on the latest from our team, explore practical advice, and get inspired to grow your digital presence. Dive in and see what’s new!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Find out how to create a link that will allow you to direct people from a public Tweet into a (private conversation) Direct Message. Twitter will turn that simple URL into a link with a clear call to action that guides a user straight into composing a new Direct Message.
