Plugin Updates: SEO Moves to the Sidebar, Geo Viewer Adds Wildcard IP Blocking
A round of updates just landed across three of our WordPress plugins — a friendlier home for the SEO dashboard, a much better country picker plus IP-level blocking in Geo Viewer, and clearer sync reporting. Here’s what changed.
PBJ SEO 3.0.1 — the dashboard moved to the sidebar
The SEO dashboard we introduced in 3.0.0 was tucked under Settings → PBJ SEO, which made it easy to lose. It now lives as its own top-level SEO item in the admin sidebar, one click from anywhere. Nothing else changed — same checklist, options, robots/sitemap tools, and 404 redirect manager.
PBJ Geo Viewer 1.3.0 — better country picking and IP blocking
- Its own sidebar item. Like SEO, Geo Viewer moved out of the Settings menu into a top-level Geo Viewer item.
- A real multi-select for countries. The old ctrl-click list is gone. Countries are now a filterable checkbox grid with “Select all shown”, “Clear all”, and a live count — picking twenty countries takes seconds.
- New: a wildcard IP blacklist. Block specific visitors by IP no matter what country they appear to be in. Enter an exact IP, a CIDR range like
192.0.2.0/24, or a wildcard like203.0.113.*or10.*.*.*. Matching visitors get the same view-only experience as a blocked country — and search engines and your logged-in admins are still always exempt.
PBJ Studio Sync 2.9.6 — meta edits, now visible
Studio Sync has always pushed posts whose only change was metadata — like a rewritten SEO meta description, which doesn’t change a page’s “modified” date. But the push summary lumped those in with everything else, so there was no way to confirm from the log that a meta-only edit had actually travelled. The summary now calls them out directly: N/M posts (new/upd, K meta-only). It’s a reporting change only — the syncing itself already worked — so you can now watch your meta descriptions flow to your live site with confidence.
All three updates are free for existing license holders. Grab them from the plugins page.
A round of updates just landed across three of our WordPress plugins — a friendlier home for the SEO dashboard, a much better country picker plus IP-level blocking in Geo Viewer, and clearer sync reporting. Here’s what changed.
PBJ SEO 3.0.1 — the dashboard moved to the sidebar
The SEO dashboard we introduced in 3.0.0 was tucked under Settings → PBJ SEO, which made it easy to lose. It now lives as its own top-level SEO item in the admin sidebar, one click from anywhere. Nothing else changed — same checklist, options, robots/sitemap tools, and 404 redirect manager.
PBJ Geo Viewer 1.3.0 — better country picking and IP blocking
- Its own sidebar item. Like SEO, Geo Viewer moved out of the Settings menu into a top-level Geo Viewer item.
- A real multi-select for countries. The old ctrl-click list is gone. Countries are now a filterable checkbox grid with “Select all shown”, “Clear all”, and a live count — picking twenty countries takes seconds.
- New: a wildcard IP blacklist. Block specific visitors by IP no matter what country they appear to be in. Enter an exact IP, a CIDR range like
192.0.2.0/24, or a wildcard like203.0.113.*or10.*.*.*. Matching visitors get the same view-only experience as a blocked country — and search engines and your logged-in admins are still always exempt.
PBJ Studio Sync 2.9.6 — meta edits, now visible
Studio Sync has always pushed posts whose only change was metadata — like a rewritten SEO meta description, which doesn’t change a page’s “modified” date. But the push summary lumped those in with everything else, so there was no way to confirm from the log that a meta-only edit had actually travelled. The summary now calls them out directly: N/M posts (new/upd, K meta-only). It’s a reporting change only — the syncing itself already worked — so you can now watch your meta descriptions flow to your live site with confidence.
All three updates are free for existing license holders. Grab them from the plugins page.