WordPress sites blocked by search engines

May 6, 2008

At Dream Whisper Designs, we truly love working with our customers to develop sites built on WordPress. WordPress is a stand alone blogging platform that is highly customizable and easy to use. And, WordPress is available as a one-click install on our Linux hosting accounts as part of our free Value Applications.

WordPress updates have been released, but many sites are still running on old WordPress installations which have known vulnerabilities open to spammers, who insert links to spam destinations within the blog page. These links are invisible to the general user but are available to web crawlers such as Google, Yahoo, and Technorati. As a result many sites that have not updated their installations are being delisted from the internet search engines. Yes, delisted – the crawlers don’t simply cease crawling these sites, but actually remove them from their indexes.

Case in point:
Fitzmorris Horse Logging, a site we built for a client in 2006, was built on WordPress 2.1.1. Though the site was indexed, it wasn’t ranking very high in the search engine results, so our client asked us to take a look at what we could do for SEO. In actuality, the SEO for the site was very easy. We discovered that posts on the site weren’t being categorized properly when publishing. For example, a post that belonged in “Horse Training” was being published to all available but irrelevant categories, so we did a little editing and training to resort the posts appropriately. In addition, we installed a few handy plugins to increase the site speed and provide better SEO, along with a better bookmarking system. Voila! Inside of a week, the site was listed on page 1 in Google for “horse logging.”

But….within a week after making these simple changes, the site didn’t appear in Google’s index at all! Why? WordPress 2.1.1. The site had been delisted.
Once discovered, we immediately upgraded the installation to WP 2.3.3 and resubmitted the site to be crawled. The results: after 2 weeks of patience, the site is now back on page 1 for “horse logging.”

Lesson: Keep your software up-to-date!
Caveat: If you are using plugins, they may no longer work or break the site when upgrading. Check to see if there is a new version of your plugins. If you are using a custom design, some changes may be necessary with the new version. Visit the WordPress Documentation and WordPress Forums for help.
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