Apple Maps link update + Stopping WooCommerce Spam Orders

Just a few bits and pieces and various updates in this email.

Free Apple Maps Link Tactic Update

In a previous email, I shared a simple tactic to get a very high powered free backlink from Apple Maps. Here’s the link to the post that explains how to do this: https://www.wpspeedfix.com/apple-maps-seo/

If you haven’t taken advantage of this it’s well worth doing.

If you did this already you’re going to need to update the link you’re using to point to the maps listing. Apple have now added canonical tags to the maps pages so there is a single correct URL you should now be linking to. If you don’t link directly to that URL the backlink will likely lose some of its power.

The link from Apple back to your site is still a full power, follow link, it’s just the URL for the maps listing itself needs updating and you need to point to the correct canonical URL of the page.

This GIF video shows you how to get the canonical URL for your maps listing: https://www.wpspeedfix.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/how-to-find-apple-maps-canonical-url.gif

Stopping WooCommerce Spam Orders

In September we saw a huge influx of customer support tickets for Woocommerce sites and a problem with fake spam orders.

These orders are testing fraudulent credit cards and put your site at risk. If you’re using a 3PL for shipping, you also may end up shipping some of these fraudulent orders which is even more problematic.

Generally we can tackle these spam orders using Cloudflare – https://www.wpspeedfix.com/how-to-stop-spam-woocommerce-orders/

If you don’t have any measures in place right now to stop these spammy fraudulent orders it’d be worth taking a look at how you can protect your site with Cloudflare as it’s only a matter of time before you get hit with one of these attacks.

Why your Google Search Console Numbers Are Down

We’ve had a ton of questions in the last month re SEO and customers seeing a significant drop in impressions in Google Search Console.

This has happened because Google disabled a feature used by many rank tracking tools to show a 100 search results on a single page. By using this feature, rank trackers were artificially pumping up impression data in Google Search Console. As such, the drop in impressions doesn’t reflect a drop in real human searches.

This update by Google also broke many rank trackers.

You can read more about this at Search Engine Roundtable at the links below.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-drops-100-results-parameter-40097.html

https://www.seroundtable.com/third-party-google-search-tracking-tools-broken-40108.html

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Thats it for this email, any questions, just hit reply – if you’re stuck with site speed or need help with SEO, email me back with some background on the problem you’re looking to solve and we can send over some recommendations.