SEO bloggers hacked through WordPress exploit
Seems SEO blogs have been targeted by a hacker who is using an exploit in the WordPress blog.
Several big sites have already been hit, and more hackings has been announced my this guy.
He had a wordpress blog, that got suspended and have now moved to blogspot to inform.
This is a snatch of what he has said his blogspot blog:
Anyways, I just started the first hacking cruzade… The easy targets (WordPress blogs with register_globals=on) using a custom PHP script based on this code
If you have a wordpress blog, you are highly recommended to upgrade it now. Patch 2.07 was released today. Read more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress
More information on this can be found at:
Digital Point
Globalwarming Awareness2007 – SEO Championship 2007
Forgot all about the email request I made for the SEO Championship 2007, and just got an email today about the startup.
We are happy to inform you that the official keyword phrase for the SEO World Championship 2007 has been released.
The selected keyword combination is:
“globalwarming awareness2007”
We wish all contestants good luck!Best regards,
GetUpdated Internet Marketing
That is great. Always been a sucker for competitions. Registered the domain I will give it a shot with: and expect it to be active sometime tomorrow.
Result pages:
globalwarming awareness2007 on Google
globalwarming awareness2007 on Yahoo
globalwarming awareness2007 on MSN
You can also find the official leaderboard here
Will try and make a clean informational page on my own cms, and slowly build some more pages into it as I get the time.
Permalinks AGAIN broken on this blog
Ok I’m to furious atm to do anything about this. I just fixed it a couple of days ago, and now the permalinks again give a 404, and I have no clue why.
I’m sorry for the disturbance it may be for those who drop by and want to read or comment on my posts, but need to go away and get my blood pressure down
Update 3 hours later:
Well, noticed WordPress released a new update 10 days after the last, so blog upgraded to 2.07 now.
That didn’t fix my permalinks problem though, so started to deativate my plugins, and kept checking the status on my permalinks.. That fixed it!
It was between google sitemaps plugin and technocrati tags plugin it happend. Can’t really see why any of these would have any impact on the permalinks, but it did something.
I could then activate them again and the 404’s are gone.
Its great it works again, but periodically errors like this can really drive me crazy, because I can’t find the main problem, and I like to solve problems.
Favicons to brand and get traffic to your webpage
Favicon is something I have known about for many years now as a web developer, but actually never bothered to spend the time to set it up on my sites as I really didn’t see the great usage for it. Bling Bling
For some reason I did not see nor predict the many benefits with this little 16×16 icon, and YouShouldKnow gave me a little bit of an eye opener after reading his blog post about Passive Digital Branding.
With some few and easy steps, you can without any future concerns, brand your logo into many peoples minds through their browser.
All the standards-compliant browsers will show your little icon several places on their browser while they browse on your site. If you are so lucky your guests bookmark your site, then it will also be shown on their bookmark list, and “stand out” among the others that don’t use it.
97% of the last sites YouShouldKnow visited, no icons was to be found. And I can agree on that, I see many many sites daily, and very few have Favicons. This means YOU got a chance to stand out of the crowd. This is a valuable thing on todays internet
How do I get a favicon?
Well, it is so easy, everyone can do this, and will only take a few minutes to do. Let me show you the steps:
- You need some software to make the graphical icon. You can get free software to it here:
https://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/
This is so easy to use. you simple upload your logo, and this free software transforms it into a compliant format and you can save it to your disk. - Now you need to upload your .ico file to the root of your domain and then insert this code between your <head>… </head> and voila.
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” >
If you use subdomains, then you need to upload the icon to the subdomains aswell.
Minor updates to Global Web Links Directory
After digging through my stats on Global Web Links Directory, I decided to remove ads from my header and from the frontpage, as they where pretty useless in terms of conversion.
This has lifted the “looks” a bit also on the site, so it dosn’t look so MFA’ish as before.
The internal search also got some adjustments in terms on restricting people to do 1 or 2 character searches, and I have coded a filter to remove the un-family friendly search terms some people use. I dont have any sexual sites in the directory, so no reason for me to show peoples wicked searches on my stats page.
Last thing I made was a AI-filter on my contactform, as I was getting bashed with more and more spam. I wont reveal what exactly I did, but it works 🙂 and only catching the ones I don’t wanna see in my inbox
Blog updated after failure in permalinks
From one day to the other all my permalinks just started giving 404 error codes on this blog. wtf!
This is one of the things I hate with software like this. Something goes wrong, and you have no clue where and what it is.
After several hours of testing, trying to correct, reading numberous of posts on the subject – I decided to delete everything except the database and start over. All the small tweaks and stuff I made went into the garbage can.
The positive things about it is the new upgrade I got with the new K2 theme.
I am flooded with work atm. so I will not have time to tweak this new blog as I did with the previous one. I might just use some of the standard plugins there are to be downloaded several places, when I get a little time 🙂
Stay tuned
Directory update: Related categories shown on internal searches
I’v made an update to a couple of my directories and will run it for some time to test and upgrade it further, before deploying to the rest of my sites.
Related categories should now be shown when you use the search option on Global Web Links Directory.
A test on this could be a search on “cars” which would return 56 different results, but now also 3 categories with the theme cars
I like the idea to digg right into certain categories, if it matches my search. And hope you do to.
The search is still new, and I already have a long list of further updating to do on it, so it meets my desires. It is not returning all the specific categories that I would like, but have a plan on how I could tweak it to do so.
Any comments or suggestions on the search are welcome, by this blog or to my mail
Updates on my Directories and related news
Ahh, it must be time for a little update here in 2007.
I have been very busy with some client tasks the past days and will continue the next couple of weeks with their projects.
Nevertheless, I keep my focus on the directories, and try to review as much as possible to keep the queues stable.
Late 2006 and start 2007 have shown me very pleasing results throughout all my directories. More of my backlinks are catching on, and I am getting better and better SERPs for my “niches”
I can mention a couple for Global WebLinks here – Google search on:
Quality directory – Rank #2 (84 million results)
SEO friendly directory – Rank #6 (1.6 million results)
Family friendly directory – Rank #2 (4 million results)
And for my detail pages, I rank extremely well on multi-word searches.. This is a clear sign, that what I have been doing the last year, isn’t to bad after all 🙂
Traffic for Global-weblinks has risen to around 1000 uniques a day, and improves daily.
Same on my Danish Regional Directory, which has around 2000 uniques these days. 95% of all searches go directly down to the detail-pages as I had worked on they should. (You can read my post about rel=”nofollow” flag for info)
Other news updates are:
Im participating in a couple of contests, and its going ok there to.
One is the “directoryranking.com” which shows the best directories for a predefined listing, and woups, I rank #1 on Google with Global-weblinks.com on a standard listing 🙂
The “directorycontest.com” is a bit harder, and I’m ranking 15 atm. 1000*factor more pages trying to rank for it, and I belive alot of the best sites, are trying to drive insane backlinks to their pages, so lets call it a SEO contest, and not Directory Contest.
I will probably do the same as eveyrone else is, and drive some hard backlinks to the detail page, as it is allowed in the rules.
Recently got interviewed by talkdirectories.com, a new Directory forum on the net. You can find the complete interview here:
Well, I guess this goes for my first 2007 post, and when I get the client tasks done, I will be back and updating you some more 🙂
New design on the International Directory
I am proud to present a new design on my international free directory Global WebLinks.
The last couple of days have been used to get this new look out to the public, and I am very pleased with the result so far.
There are still alot of tweaks to be done, but the overall theme is pretty clear now 🙂
A new friend of mine has been so kind to make this excellent design, as apart from his working speed, the quality is also in superb. I respect that!
If you have any comments, negative or good then please let me know here.
Change or remove the “Category” from your permalinks on a wordpress blog
My friend Frank over at YouShouldKnow just gave me a good tip on how to remove the optional “Category” in your category URL’s on a WordPress blog.
Normally the categories would look like this:
https://www.clausheinrich.com/category/web-directory/
with the change it will become:
Find the file wp-includes/classes.php and about halfway down you can change the settings.
To remove the category like above do this:
$this->category_structure = $this->front . ‘category/’;
change it into this:
$this->category_structure = $this->front;
Update:
In the WordPress 2.1 branch you will find the code in wp-includes/rewrite.php
Thanks to Caio Proiete for informing
WordPress Version 2.3.x branch:
Delete this:
$this->category_structure = $this->front . ‘category/’; else
WordPress Version 2.5.x branch:
I have not tried this personally, but reading from comments it is should be possible to now use the Base Category feature to disable the “category” directory.
Brad mentions in comment #27:
Adding the /. in Settings – Permalinks -Category Base field works fine in 2.5.
Where are ppl seeing the /. in the URL? (e.g. www .example.com/./foo/)
Im having no problems with it.
So feel free to test this out, and any reports back are appreciated.
UPDATED INFO – IMPORTANT: I noticed in my logs that this post is still getting traffic from people looking to change the category/ prefix.
I recommend a good plugin to handle this now: Top Level Categories.