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.

Hanging In With Entrecard

I forget how long I have been using Entrecard, but I am still active with this traffic generating social networking site. I don’t drop cards every day and rarely do I come anywhere near the 300 card drop limit.

Funny, all those blurbs about dropping 300 cards in 5 to 15 minutes just doesn’t seem to work for me. It takes me at least 45 minutes, sometimes longer to get through 300.

Regular Visitors

What I do not do enough of is to acknowledge people who visit Matt’s Musings by way of Entrecard. I know a lot of you do and some of you are my top droppers.

January 2009 statistics are in and I would like to thank and recognize the Top 10 Entrecard droppers for the month. They are:

The Way I See It

Patsy’s Words of Wisdom

One World Realty

Cooking Japanese Style

Doocci.com

Cornymans Money-Blog, everything about financial independence

AsTheCrackerheadCrumbles

The One Minute Guide

WordJourney

Best travel pictures in the world

I have started to use Adgitize again and must say that I am disappointed in this service. Twice within the first ten days they were down, sometimes for two or three days at a time.  I understand that websites have problems but prolonged outages are annoying.

Using Adgitize

Entrecard, thankfully, seems to have moved past its growing pains so let’s hope that Adgitize will soon be able to do the same thing. In any case, these kinds of sites can be useful in helping bring in some extra traffic as well as comments to your blog. I have been leaving comments more often too so hopefully our combined efforts will benefit everyone.

I also appreciate my advertisers, many of whom are regulars too. That means I will need to keep track of who is advertising and thank them in a follow up Entrecard post.

Unrelated Business

Not related to Entrecard or Adgitize but still of importance are people who are leaving comments but are doing certain things that are definitely not kosher.

For example, when filling out the spot for your name please use only your real name. The name of your company or anything besides your real name should never be used. Granted, I will sometimes change your comment to reflect your real name (if known) or if your comment is still good, I’ll make up a name. All other comments I delete.

It is considerate when people fill out there comments correctly. You already get a nice link back to your site, but I don’t want to see links within comments unless they are related to the article. Still, use the line on the comment form to include that link.

I apologize for closing with this point, but I have seen a sharp uptick in the number of people who are spamming this blog.