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Rich’s Web Design – August Newsletter
(Slightly early, due to the Google Ads Article below)
– Google AdWords, Changing to Google Ads –
– What Happens When Your Website is Hacked?-
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As of July 24th, Google AdWords is now called Google Ads. There are a few other Google products that are being combined into this new name. Thank goodness that Google AdWords Express is being removed as it was a terrible and restrictive service.
Within AdWords (Opps, Google Ads) there are a few specific changes for ETAs (Expanded Text Ads), now called ‘Responsive Search Ads‘. The number of characters per ad line are now even larger. Back in 2016, the ads went from 90 total characters to 160 characters. Now they are up to 300 characters!
Headline 1 – Still 30 characters
Headline 2 – Still 30 characters
(NEW) Headline 3 – 30 characters
2 Landing page fields – Both 15 characters
Description line was set to 80 characters – Now = 90 characters
(NEW) 2nd Description Line, also 90 characters
Responsive Display Ads, now w/ your Logo (optional, but up to 5 recommended). If you choose the upload option, keep in mind that your logo should be square (1:1) and should be 128 x 128 or greater. The recommended size for the square logo is 1200 x 1200. For best rendering, it is also recommended to add a landscape (4:1) logo, which should be 512 x 128 or greater. The recommended size for the landscape logo is 1200 x 300. For all your logos, a transparent background is best, but only if the logo is centered. The file size limit is 5MB. Further details on
Responsive Display / Search Ads.
Smart Campaigns – If you have a large ecommerce site that wants to show up on Google Merchants, there is now an Automated Feed Management. This can save you a large amount of time, instead of importing all of your product specifics individually.
Hotel Campaigns – You will now be able to make a reservation directly from a Google search, rather than visiting that hotel web site. Yes, it will require MUCH more work for each hotel, but it will save consumers time = Good for business! Listing Feed -> Price Feed -> Point of Sales Feed that uses technical backend integration.
What Happens When Your Website is Hacked?
In the past few months, one former client site and one current (non-WordPress site) client’s site was hacked. Three current WordPress client sites were hit with a brute force / massive amount of hack attempts, but was fought-off by Wordfence powerful security defensive tools.
Suffering a hack can be one of the more frustrating experiences you’ll have on your online journey. Like most things however, taking a pragmatic approach can help you maintain your sanity. While also moving beyond the issues with as little impact as possible.
A hack is a very ambiguous term, which in it of itself will provide little insights into what exactly happened. Sometimes your entire site goes down, sometimes your site is redirected to another URL, sometimes you will not see any changes in your site appearance or functionality until Google sends you (through Google Webmaster Search Console) an email telling you that your site has been hacked.
Immediate Steps:
1. Change your FTP PW / WordPress login info to something much more complex, as this is the primary way a hacker entered your site.
2. Restore your site using your latest backup files. If it’s a non-WordPress site, then either restore from a local copy or your hosting company may be able to restore from your cPanel.
3. Look in your .htaccess file for evidence of changes; Replace this file with a clean version, as this file controls your entire site.
