Business Roundup Week Ending January 26

Google to Significantly Lower Free Recaptcha Tier on April 1

On January 29, Google began sending emails to users of its reCAPTCHA service informing them of a significant change in terms and pricing.
Starting on April 1, 2024, the free reCAPTCHA service will be limited to 10,000 assessments per month rather than 1 million.
The new reduced services will be named reCAPTCHA Lite.
Additional reCAPTCHA protection can be added by upgrading to “reCAPTCHA Standard” for $8/month/site for up to 100,000 assessments.
This change significantly impacts agencies which rely on reCAPTCHA for bot protection.
Many are now considering other free CAPTCHA alternatives including hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile.
Are you ready to move away from reCAPTCHA to other protection options?

A massive 12-terabyte database containing 26 billion stolen user records was discovered last week by security researchers.
While the sheer size is eye watering, the database is a compilation of past platform breaches rather than new hacks, so there are likely no surprises here.
Major sites impacted include Tencent, Weibo, MySpace, Twitter, Wattpad, LinkedIn, AdultFriendFinder, Adobe, MyFitnessPal, and Canva. Government entities were also affected.
This news is a good opportunity to remind clients about the principles of good password hygiene and the importance of using a password manager.
Use online tools like haveibeenpwned.com to check if you or your clients have been affected.
How do you educate your clients about good security practices?
Read the full article on Mashable here.

Troubling pattern has emerged where sites with certain generic top-level domains (like .media and .club) completely drop out of Google’s search results over the weekend making them unable to even rank for their own domain names.
“Google Weekend Ranking Bug” was first reported in November 2023 but has escalated dramatically in January 2024.
Prevailing theory is an algorithm bug now intermittently and erroneously devaluing sites with keyword-focussed TLDs.
Reminiscent of “legacy penalties” where low-quality sites got stuck in ranking looks – but this weekend bug affects TLDs with no known history of violations.
Do you have sites taking a hiatus for the weekend?
Read a thorough explanation of the issue on SearchEngineJournal.com.