Random babble by Paulh

Running an old version of WordPress?
Then you Google rankings are at risk!

Old versions of WordPress have plenty of security vulnerabilities, hackers can install malware, or simply insert links in your content. Google doest want to send users to these hacked sites and cannot trust sites that have had links inserted throughout the site.

Recently DaveN a top seo saw what can happen when to your rankings when your site is compromised.

There is always a chance you site gets compromised in some way or another, but if your running a particularly vulnerable version of a CMS that is being highly abused  then its probably easier and smarter for the likes of Google to just abandon your site(just as you probably have).

Google has already started warning webmasters using very old versions of a WordPress.

(this comes from )

Guess you could try and hide the version of WordPress you are using - would help stop the hackers from finding you, but dont hide it 100% and you could lose your trust with google - easier to just upgrade! If you manage lots of wordpress sites ther are tools about to upgrade all your sites from one interface.

Bill Slawski has written a review of google patents “Key Relevance Review of Google Patents”

For any SEO trying to stay in the arms race with Google these patenets combined with google research papers offer a great insight in to where the monster is heading.

On another site i manage we have been experincing a very slow admin interface. No matter what we tried to do it was taking 30 seconds for anything to happen. No errors in logs, no errors on page, site loaded fine. Other wordpress sites on same server were working fine.

So the solution was to go into phpmyadmin and deactivate all the plugins(was too slow to deactivate them all through the wordpress admin panel). Find the field “active_plugin” in the options table and remove all the text. Once deactivated, enable each plugin one at a time through the wordpress admin panel, for us it was the alinks plugin. Never had any problems with this plugin before, but for now it has to remain disabled.

Unfortunately we cant upgrade to the latest version of alinks as its no longer compatible with our LAMLP setup. Luckily we are in the middle of creating our own lightweight fast version of alinks/cross linker type plugin.

Took the plunge and switched 2.6 on its day of release. Usually prefer to wait a week for minor patches, but need to see what changes they have made.
At first glance nothing has changed. No issues with existing plugins. Seems like there are some cool new features such as Post Revisions. http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/

Only just noticed that yahoo site explorer will show you backlinks for images. Guess i missed this one when reading seo for dummies.

Was looking to see what i would have to do to make this image of DougS rank for doug scott (better file name would help) and noticed yahoo was showing which pages referenced the image.

Anyway i guess this has a few amusing and practical uses, tracking pixels ;).

Take a look at who uses Googles logo

Doug told me he wanted a new domain for his blog to keep his crazy rants separate from ASAP.

After he rejected my first suggestions by telling me to fuck off, i decided to ask everyone else at Dougs for their suggestions.

After removing the abusive suggestions we ended up with the following…

• dougblog.co.uk
• fattwat.co.uk
• dougblab.co.uk
• dougsmouth.co.uk
• dougsgob.co.uk
• droug.co.uk
• worldofdoug.co.uk
• dougsrants.co.uk
• dougsringpiece.co.uk
• dougsmouthpiece.co.uk

You can help pick the winning domain by voting here on the right

Over the years I’ve had few search engines of choice.

Before 1999 it was infoseek, but I used to hop from infoseek to several other engines if something was hard to find.

Hotobot

Altavista

Excite

Lycos

2001/2002 when google was overrun with spam I would occasionally switch to alltheweb or yahoo.

Apart from a few rare occasions I’ve had google search as my home page for 5 plus years now. Thinking it’s about time I gave another engine a trial. So for the next week I’m having live.com as my home page - going to try not to do a single search on google - going to need a lot of willpower!