The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

There’s a worm circulating that can totally infect your WordPress blog, unless you upgrade it to its current version (2.8.4). This is pretty easy to do manually.  I listed all of the steps here: http://ovblogger.com/473/upgrading-wordpress/ that will guide you through.

It’s important to have a backup, just in case something goes wrong, and that’s easy with the WP-Database Backup plugin.  Since this blog was hacked a couple of years ago, I’ve had a backup sent to me via email every week. Thank heaven, I’ve not had to use the backups, but you just never know. Believe me, it really sucks when everything you’ve posted for a couple of years is wiped out. And you know that I post a lot.

But if you installed your WordPress blog via Fantastico, it’s even simpler to upgrade. Just go into cPanel, and check to see if you can get the upgraded version. Then, it’s a matter of just clicking a button to have Fantastico do the upgrade.

The only problem there is that it often takes Fantastico a while to get the newer versions installed. That’s why it’s good to learn manual upgrading because then, you’re not hanging out to dry while Fantastico does it stuff. Manual installation and upgrade isn’t at all as hard as you think. WordPress has some excellent tutorials on the process, too.

The worm in question wipes out archives, which is bad in terms of your search engine standing. When Google sees too many pages of any site not working, they tend to remove it from their index, which can cost you lots of traffic.  Don’t let hackers do to you what they did to me. Get yourself upgraded, and always, always be sure to back things up.

Have you seen Microsoft’s new (revamped) search engine “Bing” yet?

Pretty cool.

Every day, there’s a different picture when you start out, and when you rest your mouse on different parts of the picture, you can see little tags of information. Today, it’s Denali National Park, home to Mt. McKinley. If you want to see where it is, there’s a link to the map. If you want to know about dog sledding (because it’s how rangers patrol the park in winter), there’s a link for that. Pretty interesting, I think. I can’t wait to see where we’ll be tomorrow. That’s totally non-Google, eh? Nice!

When you do an actual search, it’s simplified. I did a search for “eye glasses” just because it was on top of my mind. I need new ones, and I got the usual results. Eyeglasses.com came up first. But over to the left-hand side, I get “Women, Men, Babies, Kids…” This engine gives you categories to make searching easier.

The usual tabs are at the top… “Web, Video, Images, News, Maps, More…” And the suggested searches, rather than being at the bottom of the page, like they are at Google, are in a left-hand sidebar.

I’m not sure that Bing will overtake Google anytime soon, but that remains to be seen. It’s just fun to play around with because it’s not the same old thang… ya know?