February 22, 2023

Active Voice, Audit Services,

and GoDaddy Hackers

Hello Ruth Ann,

Last week certainly wasn't good for GoDaddy, which discovered it had been the victim of a concerted three-year hacking operation. Details emerged when it filed its year-end financial report for 2022; a link to the report appears in the third story below.

As one of the most extensive website hosts in the world, GoDaddy is an obvious target. A statement on its website explains that it's working with law enforcement from around the world and will be "using lessons from this incident to enhance the security of our systems and further protect our customers and their data."

If you are hosted on GoDaddy, I'd recommend changing your password often - maybe weekly - and using two-factor authentication. These steps are the best protections you can provide for your site and any accounts you access online that hold personal or financial information.

Til next week,

Ruth Ann Monti

Writing Tips

Content is much easier to follow when it's written in an active voice. This approach uses a pretty straightforward sentence structure, with a clear path from the subject followed by a verb and object.

Active voice is especially helpful when you're writing headlines. I googled "hacking news" and clicked on the News tab. The top stories had short, active headlines that delivered a hook beyond the primary stories:

Active writing is a straightforward style that helps readers quickly grasp the sequence of events. It's the preferred way to write in almost every format, from blogging to posting.

Passive writing is a backward approach to writing. "Hacking Into GoDaddy by Sophisticated Group Compromised Customer Accounts" is an accurate headline but unnecessarily complicates the message.

Grammarly has more to say about active vs passive voice.

My Web Content & Writing FAQs

SEO/Content News

Strictly speaking, this isn't news, but I haven't discussed it here: I provide website content audits.

If your site isn't delivering traffic and leads, it's time for a content refresh. Your content may be a bit dated or too thin to rank. I provide one-hour sessions to review what you have and how you can strengthen it.

GoDaddy was Hacked - Big Time!

If you read the first item in this newsletter, you know that GoDaddy disclosed three years of ongoing hacks of its various networks.

According to its year-end financial statement for 2022, things started looking odd in March 2020 when it realized login credentials for 28,000 customers and employees had been stolen. Then, in November 2021, a single password was "compromised," affecting codes in over one million WordPress sites. (Details on page 30.)

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