Feed your WordPress Demons!
Folks in the Internet marketing world are obsessed about losing their rankings on Google. Google drives a whole lot of traffic, and you simply cannot compare it to Yahoo! or other search engines when it comes to traffic potential. I used to be one of those folks who had this obsession with my rankings. If I lost a place on the SERPs, I would just get mad or completely overhaul my blog. I would check my rankings every hour to see if there had been any changes. Those are the dark age days…
Google does slap folks and sites that allow folks to take a shortcut to the top of the SERPs. Search engine optimization is all about hard work, and you cannot expect to buy or shortcut your way to the top. Now, you may come right out of the gate and have the best site in your niche, but Google and other engines are not smart enough to realize if you are “legit.” Besides, consistency matters as well, and website who have been around more than you have may get the nod over you.
Unless you haven’t been paying attention, a whole lot of folks have been complaining about their sites having dropped or disappeared from the face of Google results pages. That could be devastating if your mortgage payment depends on it. But blaming Wordpress for your failure to comply with Google guidelines is just another way of not taking responsibility for your actions.
Google has prepared a whole list of guidelines for all webmasters to read, and just because you are running Wordpress, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it. For instance, Wordpress does suffer from duplicate content issues, and you will need to modify your .htaccess to fix those issues. In addition, you need to make sure you have the right permalink structure to maximize your SEO rankings. Now this is important: ALWAYS look out for nasty errors in your code. My site disappeared from Google a couple of months ago, and I tried everything I could to get it back. Nothing worked. I was lucky to try W3C validator, and found out that my code had a nasty error in it that was blocking the whole validation process. Now if the validator can’t go through your code to figure out more errors, there is a good chance Google bot can’t either. Needless to say, I was back in the SERPs two weeks after I fixed the error.
It’s true that your Wordpress site can get slapped by Google. But it’s also true that you should be responsible enough to take care of your Wordpress site. Blaming the platform for your woes in the organic search channel is pointless and a waste of time.
Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform in the world and it’s used by most folks as their primary website creation package. Folks just don’t use Wordpress to create blogs, but they also use it to create serious corporate or other types of sites. Popularity has a price, however. Hackers are always out there to target the most popular software packages and sites that are using these packages. The attacks on Wordpress blogs have been nothing short of intensive.
One way folks can figure out how to attack your site is by figuring out what plug-in you are using or hacking your Wordpress account. While there is no foolproof way to avoid getting hacked, there are ways to protect it. Here is how:
You should Prevent others from uncovering your plug-ins: many hackers use plug-ins that you have installed against you. Many of these plug-ins are not up-to-date or come with security holes that can compromise your blog. Folks just type in your plug-ins URL to get a list of plug-ins that you have in place. I personally use Redirection plug-in to redirect all invalid requests to home-page. You can also put an empty index file in your plug-ins and themes folders.
You should disable user registration: a lot of folks like to give their readers the ability to register accounts on their blogs. That is simply not a good idea as it makes protecting your blog more complicated that in needs to be. Disable registration to give yourself some peace of mind.
You should Hide Your Wordpress Info: you should try to hide your Wordpress version from public eyes. Many of us don’t apply the latest patches instantly, which means our blogs could be targeted by hackers. You should take out all the references to your blog presence from the public eye.
At the end of the day, you should try everything in your power to make life hard for hackers. You are never going to be able to protect your blog against hackers, but the above techniques give you a start.
In the 2nd part of this post, I’ll talk about other ways that you can protect your blog against hackers. So stay tuned.
Creating a gaming site used to be too tough before. Sure. You can pay someone to write you a website that is attractive, but I rather not waite for someone to do it for me (and obviously charge me $1000 or more for it). Well. The good folks at Elegant Themes have released a super new theme that takes care of the whole problem.
eGamer comes with a right color contract (I would say) for a gaming website. You get the standard “recent game reviews” section in the sidebar that has a star-system ranking well-integrated in it. Like all Elegant Themes, eGamer is compatible with Safari, Opera, Firefox, and IE 6 & 7.
What I like about eGamer is the fact that you get the Photoshop files for the theme as well. In essence, you can change the logo if you know Photoshop, which is something you’d have to do from scratch with other themes. I also like the fact that you can play with the footer and remove the copyright if you like. Not that I recommend it, but some themes have annoyingly long copyright notices, and that turns me off.
Overall, the theme looks fit for a gaming, or even a wrestling site. The featured article section is optional but great for promoting the best your site has to offer. I also like the fact that you get all the updates for this theme and a bunch of others for only about $20 a year. That’s way too cheap to ignore. Good luck with your Wordpress gaming site.
I don’t know about you but updating all my Wordpress blogs to the latest edition of Wordpress is not only time consuming but plain exhausting. And let’s not forget that sometimes you make a mistake and delete a folder that you shouldn’t have, and things get more complicated. Now there are paid plug-ins that allow you to auto update your Wordpress blog, but the good folks at Fun Scripts have written a freeware that essentially takes care of the most of the process.
All you have to do is install Easy WP Installer. You are then presented with a form that contains your DB and connnection information. Once you have entered the correct information, you can set this and almost forget it. It’s a very easy to use Plug-in and a must have if you want to keep up with the latest Wordpress updates.
If you have been hacked before, you know how important it is to stay out of trouble and protect your blog. Easy WP Installer is not a hacker buster but it does put the latest Wordpress patches on your blog. I am just not sure why the guys who wrote this are not charging us for it.
After months of waiting for Wordpress 2.7, it’s finally here. The good folks at Wordpress just announced that the new WP 2.7 is now stable and available for download. It’s truly history for the Wordpress community. Wordpress has come a long way in the past couple of years, but Wordpress 2.7 now pushes the CMS over the top.
I highly encourage you to download WP 2.7 now. It’s going to save you a whole lot of headache. It’s very easy to use, and it’s designed to be more secure. The innovative features added will truly make the update worth your while. Here is where you can grab your own copy.
