Read Charles Heflin’s ‘SEO20/20’ latest blog post titled “Your WordPress Blog May Be At Risk”.


Charles Heflin’s latest blog post is reprinted here.

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Your WordPress Blog May Be At Risk

A good point was raised to me by a fellow SEO 20/20 member (Miranda). She forwarded me a message that she had received in regard to a pinging flaw in the WordPress blog software.

Some of you may or may not be aware of this flaw. I thought it would be a good idea to bring it to your attention and provide you with a free plugin that will immediately fix the flaw.

Whenever you make a post to your WordPress blog it is set to automatically ping a list that you have included in the “update services” under options/writing.

The flaw occurs when you edit a post that has already been posted. WordPress will ping that list again. This has the possibility of getting your blog banned from certain update services.

For example: Say I want to edit this post to cerrect a spelling mistake 10 minutes after I originally published it. WordPress pings my update list once on the original post and then again 10 minutes later when I edit the post. This has the potential to be seen as ping spamming or blog spamming by some update services.

There is a free plugin available here: http://www.problogtools.com/. This site requires you to opt in to a mailing list to receive the plugin to correct the flaw. I don’t really like this but at the moment, I cannot find another source.

Here is a quote from wordpress.org

“Update Services are tools that you can use to let other people know that you have updated your blog. WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you have updated your blog by sending an XML-RPC (http://www.xmlrpc.com/) ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and update their proprietary indices with your update. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or DayPop can find your most recent posts!”

Notice the text in italic/bold from the quote above. Unless you are very careful to ensure that your published posts are 100% accurate before you hit the publish button, you could put your blog at unnecessary risk by continually editing (updating) an existing post and repeatedly pinging the update services.

I am currently looking for a plug-in that doesn’t require you to opt-in to a mailing list. Anyone who knows of where to find a solution for this other than the one stated above, please leave a comment.

Thank you,

Charles Heflin

The author Charles Heflin is dedicated to educating aspiring webmasters to create solid online businesses through proven and cutting edge strategies. For more information visit:
SEO Tutorials (with videos)
SEO Blog

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*IMNewswatch would like to thank Charles Heflin for granting exclusive rights to reprint this latest blog post.

 

 

 

 

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