{"id":324,"date":"2008-01-28T14:25:20","date_gmt":"2008-01-28T19:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/28\/google-hearts-me-again\/"},"modified":"2011-12-09T12:47:04","modified_gmt":"2011-12-09T16:47:04","slug":"google-hearts-me-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/28\/google-hearts-me-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Google hearts me again"},"content":{"rendered":"

To any of you out there with a blog run by the WordPress platform, here’s a warning to all of you: Keep your WordPress software updated. I was taking the “it works fine” mentality on my software and not updating for at least 6 months. Big mistake. One of the fixes that I did not install was a vulnerability in the database. This vulnerability allowed a hacker to hack into my blog, create a new user account, and create about 40 spam postings. Not comments, but actual postings. The postings were posted-dated and did not show up on the “front” of the blog so I never noticed them.<\/p>\n

My only clue to their existence came in the form of an email from Google saying my site had been removed from their index because of spam. I thought it was spam comments that slipped through the spam catcher but was horrified to see the damage that was done. It took sometime to sift through my blog and delete the offending posts.<\/p>\n

Worse though, was that after being removed from Google index, it took about 2 months to get back in. The old adage “A website not in Google’s index practically does not exist” is very true: Removal from the index all but makes your site invisible. Traffic from keyword searches was cut by more than half.<\/p>\n

But alas, a happy ending. Last week I finally got back in the index, this time with updated WordPress software and a changed password in my court. As a soapbox moment, I can’t help but to point out the absence of ethics of spammers who hack into people’s blog, and get the blog banned from a search index. That is pretty damaging. Thankfully I don’t make money off this blog. If I did, it would have done serious financial harm to me. My guess is if this done to a bigger cat in the blogosphere, like one of the many blogs owned by Time-Warner, these spammers could be facing litigation seeking damages. That said, the offenders are probably in Africa, Russia, or other place outside of US government reach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To any of you out there with a blog run by the WordPress platform, here’s a warning to all of you: Keep your WordPress software updated. I was taking the “it works fine” mentality on my software and not updating for at least 6 months. Big mistake. One of the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[57],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":997,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.accphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}