AntiVirus For WordPress Detects Mischief

I have several blogs under my management, each of which is underpinned by WordPress (WP), the content management system. I have extolled the virtues of WP for several years now, glad that I abandoned Blogger for this particular arrangement.

But, WP isn’t without its share of problems, most notably its vulnerability to being exploited. Many of the updates accomplished over the past few years were rushed into place when a security issue was suddenly uncovered. A quick patch and your WP was updated; your blog safe as long as you took security problems seriously and uploaded the changes.

Google SERPs

Recently, I uncovered a problem with one of my blogs that would not have been discovered had I not stumbled upon it in the first place. It seems that some of the descriptions in Google’s SERPs had been changed from article snippets to describe porn terms.

If you are not sure what I mean, do a site search (site:yoursite.com) to see the two-three line description of what your articles are about. That description should match the article, but in the case of this website some of the filthiest terminology has replaced what should be there. Yes, you have to add a dirty word to find out if your SERPs have been hacked, but include the word porn and you’ll know for sure (site:yoursite.com porn).

Frantic, I began to search the internet for answers but found very little support. Google’s site, as usual, wasn’t much help as they explained that such descriptions are generated from the website. Which got me thinking: could there be a bit of malicious code embedded in that blog? Might that code be messing with the SERPs?

AntiVirus Plug-in

Cutting to the chase, I turned to the AntiVirus For WordPress plug-in developed by Sergej Müller for help, thinking that a rogue comment got through. Turns out that my comment files were fine, but the plug-in turned up a problem with coding in the sidebar. Specifically, “AntiVirus” scans through your WordPress theme to detect problems and it was the sidebar.php file that was shown to be infected.

Isolating the problem, I discovered that a script used to rotate ads was infected. This script was built by a web designer so we removed it (from my client’s blog) and ran the virus check again—all clean. My client will work with his designer to make sure that the replacement code passes muster.

The SERPs still reflect the other junk, but I’m sure within a few days the site the problem will pass when Google Bot crawls the site. Thankfully, most visitors wouldn’t see the problem in the first place and, if they should click on the description, they’d still be able to see the blog’s pages as normal.

Whacking Mischief

Still, who wants to have their site associated with porn? Plus, you have to wonder if such mischief would eventually cause your pages to sandboxed by the search engines. Ouch.

I Took A Bite Out Of Bit.ly!

Honestly, how do you keep up with all of it? I mean, how can you possibly track all of the wonderful web applications, extensions and related paraphernalia which are rolled out, updated and refined on what seems to be a daily basis?

Biting Bit.ly

A case in point is Bit.ly, an odd sounding but amazingly resourceful URL shortener packed with all the amenities you can imagine. Not only are your web addresses shortened when you use this tool, but you can change the suffix to something that is uniquely yours.

For example, when I created an automatically shortened link for this lengthy URL: http://thearticlewriter.com/autowriter/no-mahindra-models-this-year/, Bit.ly rendered http://bit.ly/xWeBv instead.

But it gets even better than that.

Next, I adjusted the URL to read http://bit.ly/mahindra-trucks/ which allowed me to claim “Mahindra trucks” as my embedded word phrase. Why was this important to me? Well, Mahindra will be selling their all new pickup trucks in the United States beginning Spring 2010, therefore I wanted a recognizable and highly searchable web address to match my article. After all, if I’m to promote my authority as an automotive columnist, you should be able to find some of my cutting edge articles, right? You bet!

Certainly, I could have used an abbreviated URL on my blog post, but I don’t: I prefer to match my title with my URL which makes for some very long Twitter-unfriendly web addresses.

Customizing Bit.ly

Of course, what good is a URL shortener if all it does is whack your address and allow you to customize it? Certainly, having statistics to go along with your work would help.

Indeed, Bit.ly offers registered users the ability to track their links by seeing just how many people click on their links over a period of time as well as within the past hour, what sites are referring traffic to your URL, the countries from where clicks are coming from, and what Twitter conversations are mentioning your URL. Track buzz in real time or sort through that information days later. The choice is yours.

Bit.ly is, by the way, the default URL shortener for TweetDeck and was recently incorporated into Twitter itself. This is good news, because a number of web shortener applications have closed down or will close down eventually including Tr.im. This means that if your web shortener dies, then your links will perish too – not a good prospect, especially if you’ve put so much time into working your links.

Influencing Bit.ly

In just a few days I entered 75 links into Bit.ly from across my site network in a bid to gauge effectiveness. I mixed new articles with old ones including some I had tweeted in the past. A handful completely bombed because they ran out of tweeter juice ages ago. Still, the related statistical information comes in handy, something I will be using along with Google Analytics to help me monitor traffic, referrals, locations and more.

Are you using Twitter? Lots of people are and, according to Danny Sullivan, it ranks up there with Tiny URL which is the grand-daddy of all address shorteners on the market.

Libya Bit.ly

Lastly, the .ly extension for Bit.ly stands for Libya. That country has had its ups and downs over the years, which may cause some people to worry that Libya could one day whack Bit.ly, Owl.ly and others who are using this domain extension. But, with two million dollars in recently funding, the investors in Bit.ly don’t seem to be worrying about this URL shortener’s long term survival, thus I won’t either.