Comments on: Security update: Upgrade your WordPress to 2.3.3

By: David Jacques-Louis

David Jacques-Louis — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:09:05 +0000

Why doen’t they eliminate WordPress 2.3.3 - Passive XSS hacks, used by hackers? There are list of them availible, but nobody from the WP community seems to do something about the old hacks availible.

By: salesstrategy

salesstrategy — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:17:58 +0000

Thanks for the update, I hope it is easy to update through cPanel>fantastico.

Regards,

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:28:23 +0000

Thanks Matt for the how-to on the easy way to update. Easy is always a good thing when it comes to me and any kind of programming things.

By: Morristown

Morristown — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:46:39 +0000

Wow, users to be able to edit your blog posts. Is it really that wide open?? Shocking.

By: Webdesign

Webdesign — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:03:20 +0000

I updated my own wordpress site and also those of my clients.

I dind’t subscribe to the feed, but updates are also listed on the wordpress dashboard.

Thanks for posting Matt!

By: Peter (IMC)

Peter (IMC) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:37:22 +0000

I wouldn’t assume hidden text helps ANY page in Google.

Well, you´re assuming wrong. Hidden text works perfectly. Google’s algorithms obviously aren’t capable of detecting if text is hidden or not. At least it doesn’t seem to be a standard check. At most a manual check after a spam report came in.

Consider that a site got a top10 position for a keyword that only exists in hidden text and doesn’t have those keywords in any external backlinks. That doesn’t deserve to rank high. It doesn’t even deserve to be indexed.

I know that you probably find this a lot less in english language countries because people know it’s a high risk thing to do. But in other languages there is very little communication from search engines to webmasters. (is improving a bit, but webmasters in other languages that don’t speak english aren’t really looking for communications from search engines either) The result is that a lot of old fashion SEO techniques are still pretty common. And dumb as it may seem, they do work.

By: Ted

Ted — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:16:24 +0000

Ilan - You can report pages by clicking on “ads by google” if they have Google ads on the page. Plus Google had DE-valued the on page text. So it’s likely they are using multiple ranking methods. Not just text cheats.

By: ilan

ilan — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:11:53 +0000

I can’t tell how frustrating it is to see sites rank high that use very simple techniques to hide keywords and stuff pages full of keywords. Why can’t the spam team of Google do something about that?

By: Td

Td — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:25:09 +0000

I haven’t found one upgrade procedure that was clear or comprehensive. Even the manual process leaves me with a questionable upgrade and persistent nagging to upgrade.

By: Dave (original)

Dave (original) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:47:58 +0000

I can’t tell how frustrating it is to see sites rank high that use very simple techniques to hide keywords and stuff pages full of keywords. Why can’t the spam team of Google do something about that?

I remember that Google very proudly took sites of BMW or Mercedes out of the index because they used spam techniques. But an unknow @$$&#¨#& can put a 60000 page site online with completely keyword stuffed pages in (parcially) hidden divs and put another site in an iframe and get away with it. Even after Google received numerous spam reports about it.

I wouldn’t assume hidden text helps ANY page in Google.

The BMW case was likely more of a message to SEO and Webmasters than anything. That is, they made an example of them, but haven’t been consistent in treatment of hidden text.