So what is the real harm?

The most obvious, and urgent harm, comes from exposing your website to potential comprimise. If a vulnerability is found in a WordPress plugin it can take just a few seconds to find a host of web sites  to attack. Using Google’s inurl command a simple search of inurl:wp-content/plugins returns more than 8 million results for a cracker to start his or her search for likely targets.

A dedicated cracker will comprimise your site, but there is no reason to make it easy for them.

Another less obvious problem is created by Google itself. In just this one simple search we’ve seen more than 8 million web pages that have no reason to be in the index. They serve no useful purpose other than to show how invasive Google can be with it’s crawler. It also demonstrates a duplicate content issue that needs to be addressed.

The real problem, however, is the harm this can cause each website this happens to.

It is known that Google may not index all of the pages in a website for various reasons. Assume you have a website with 100 pages. Yet Google decided to index 30 pages of your /wp-content or wp-admin/ folders. You have lost the postential for 30% of your pages to be indexed in favor of pages that should never have been in the index at all. I have seen sites with more than 50% of their indexed pages coming from the back end of WordPress.

What can you do about it?

There are two things that you should do to help secure your site from search engines exploring where they don’t belong.

1. Robots.txt: With every WordPress install I do these days I add this to my robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /blog/wp-includes/

Be sure to adjust the URL for your site’s install folders.

2. Google’s Webmaster Tools: If you find these pages indexed for your site first install the robots.txt file. Once that is done you should enter your GWT account and remove those pages from the index. Once removed the robots.txt should keep them from being re-indexed.

Unfortunately, from then on you will see and error message in your GWT account. You can ignore this error.

What does all of this tell us? The biggest thing it tells us is that the Google spiders are not as smart as everyone, including Google, would like us to believe. Indexing these pages serves no purpose, and it shows that the bots can and will go to places that they really should not be in and you must be proactive in protecting your website from them. A person would know that there is no reason to index more than 8 million of the exact same pages. An algorithm cannot make that decision.

So, what did I fail at? A couple people knew that this was coming, but I bet that most haven’t noticed that this blog is now running on a new domain name and under a new operating name. Yup, I picked a business name without doing enough research, I let myself make an assumption that could have potentially turned in to wee bit ‘o drama in the future.

The name I had originally chosen was Large Orange Pop. I have a thing for the 50s even though I was born in the 60s, and the idea of looking for a name that had more potential as a brand than as a description of some services I may offer appealed to me. It appealed to me so much that I simply assumed that I was the only one to think of it. As usual, assumptions can go wrong. There is another company out there that had a similar idea, Orange Soda, only they had it several years ago.

So what’s a guy to do? The obvious, move on quickly and put it behind me. I found a new name that I like that also lends itself toward branding, and when I finally have the time to work on it, a new look and feel featuring my favorite 50s villains and heroes, robots. Hopefully the rebuild won’t take too long, but fortunately I am heavy with client work at the moment that may keep me from working on my own site.

Takeaway?

Do your research! You may have a great idea that you think is completely unique, but odds are you would be wrong.

I was running the Andy Beard hack Anti-Social to resolve the busted StumbleUpon link and the noFollow issue. But Joost has taken things to the next level by simply exercising the GPL license and releasing a new update of his own that fixes those issues and adds a few new social links:

• Sphinn
• Facebook
• Mixx
• Google Bookmarks
• Live
• Twitter

Plus with Joost managing it now I suspect that fixes and updates will be far more regular these days. Thanks Joost for doing this!

1. Author Image – I added this little gem to the individual post pages to give my guest bloggers some love. I had some help from the guys at SEO Fox making some minor alterations for my specific application, thanks William. Each Author image is linked and so is their name. May not be keyword rich, but it is a good link.
2. Related Widgets – A huge benefit to internal navigation is being able to direct your readers easily to more content that they like. The best way to do this is adding a few related post links to each page. We’ll see how often it gets used. I know that most people put their’s right below each post, but ‘m giving SEM Logic’s widget a test and I like it in the sidebar right below the author image. Maybe an Author’s posts widget might be next on the agenda.

That’s it for now. I’m hoping that I’m nearing the end of the initial build and I can get back to work actually providing new thoughts on the subject of internet marketing.

1. Akismet – duh- spam sucks and Akismet doesn’t
2. Dofollow – Just because Google screwed up all things link related doesn’t mean we need to follow their lead. Links are “good things”
3. FeedSmith – Another must have plugin. FeedSmith makes getting your content out there so much easier.
4. My Category Order – This widget makes it easy to put your categories in the order that makes sense to you.
5. SEO Title Tag – Another important plugin that gives you the power to control your post and page titles regardless of what you put on the page.
6. Antisocial – I have to have it. At least make it easy for your visitors to spread the word about you. And this hacked version of Socliable from Andy Beard adds nofollow to the links, adds Sphinn to the group, and fixes the SU bug.
7. Top Commentators – This newer widget is a great way to reward the people that post to your blog. Give them some link love for helping you with some content.
8. Database Backup – This may seem like a nothing plugin, but you can set it to run scheduled backups, and have those backups emailed to you, or maybe a free gmail account for a free offsite backup.
9. Video Plugin – With video being more and more important every day, how can you possibly run a blog without an easy to use video plugin?

Huh, who knew I would run so many plugins right out of the box? Did I miss a plugin that you love?? Develop a new plugin you want tested and talked about?? Don’t just sit there, let me know about it.