Wordpress hacking and google
No this isn’t a guide on how to hack into wordpress, but rather a warning.
If you are using a version of wordpress that isn’t up to date, your site is at risk and you may not even realise it. Hackers have been getting into wordpress sites and adding links to pages. Now this wouldn’t be too bad except the links are hidden - you can’t see them but google can.
The only way to be sure is to look at the code for your pages.
After I had heard of this problem I looked at my sites and blogs that use wordpress - I have about six in total. The two that were using the most up to date version of wordpress were not affected, but two of the other four had been hacked without my realising.
The first was easy to resolve - I republished the theme files and the problem disappeared. But the other was harder to solve. The second site had had individual posts hacked, with hundreds of links added to the end of some posts. (This was on this blog.)
This is a much worse problem, because upgrading your wordpress version won’t help - the posts themselves contained the hidden links, and only some posts, so it was necessary to look through the html for each and every post to see which were affected. Time-consuming to say the least.
The most curious thing was - on the posts containing the hidden links the adsense was for vi**ra and related products - so adsense were reading the code and thinking it was the main subject of the page.
Whch makes me wonder, might google also automatically penalise the site for ‘link selling’ if it sees hundreds of links to unrelated sites? If they did it would be a complete mystery to many owners what they had done wrong - because of course they had done nothing wrong!!
Anyway, the only conclusion can be - if you are not using an up to date version of wordpress, check your site very carefully for hacking of this nature and upgrade as soon as possible.
Upgrading wordpress usually only takes 10 minutes (less if you have cpanel with one-click upgrade) and is definitely worth the time and effort!