How To Completely Clean Your Hacked WordPress Installation

Update 08/13/2015 – Please note: The following Do It Yourself guide on how to de-hack your website is designed for people who don’t necessarily know how to read php, but do know how to work their way through installing WordPress, themes, and plugins. It also assumes you know your way around whichever hosting control panel it is that comes with your host. Because malicious code can be very hard to weed out from the legitimate stuff, especially for someone who is not a programmer, this guide recommends that you start over with a completely fresh theme on your site. This means that for many, the customizations that were done to the theme will be lost, or will need to be re-done. For those of you who would prefer not to do that, or who have a complicated or ecommerce site, or one with heavy traffic and you would like to completely minimize the downtime, I do offer professional cleaning services. I can de-hack and secure your site without losing any of the design or functionality, and in most cases there is only a few minutes of downtime near the end of the process. For more information, please fill out my contact form.

WordPress hacker removal spray... use in a well ventilated area. Getting hacked sucks, plain and simple. It can affect your rankings, cause your readership to be exposed to virus and trojan attacks, make you an unwilling promoter to subject material you may not actually endorse, and in many cases cause the loss of valuable content. However, once it happens it is usually best to not procrastinate on the clean up process,

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If Googleplex Employees Don’t Understand The Webmaster Guidelines, How Can They Expect Webmasters To Adhere To Them?

Nancy Drew, we need you! Last month, in one of my posts, I had decided to include a few images to see how well they might rank for their keyphrases. I had never targeted any of the image searches, and due to one of the topics of the post it seemed like a good opportunity to do so. When I went to check later to see if the images happened to be indexed yet, they weren’t. It had only been a couple of days, and I really didn’t expect them to be there yet, so that was really no surprise. What did surprise me, however,

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Googlebot Creates Pages Instead of Simply Indexing Them: New FORM Crawling Algo Goes Bad

Last month Google revealed a new crawling method that they were testing out, whereby they were filling out forms on sites that they came across, in order to help facilitate the discovery of new pages. Matt Cutts discussed it here last month. I had noticed the phenomena

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With Only 14 Accident Free Days At Google, Should Google Health Come With A Warning?

Google Factory: 14 accident free days. For now.Often times in factories around the country, looking up on the wall you can see a chalkboard or a sign boasting of how many consecutive “accident free” days those on the job have enjoyed. These are placed there as a form of encouragement for workers to be careful, to encourage healthy competition between departments, and are often coupled with a sense of pride and accomplishment as the number in the display rises day after day. If and when an accident occurs, that day the number is reset back to zero.

Were the Google Factory to have such a sign on it’s services

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Introducing: PuzzCAPTCHA Advanced Comment Form Protection, LinkMyPics – The Hotlink Advantage Maximizer… Oh, and Evan Rachel Wood, Topless [NFSW]

No, I have NOT been hacked... No, my blog wasn’t hacked by porno webmasters, and no, I’m not converting Smackdown to an adult website (although, to be honest, kids or sensitive people should always approach my blog with caution). I wanted to test some of the various image search algos, and as it just so happens the search [Evan Rachel Woods Topless] currently brings up no valid results on Google Images (which kind of surprised me, but more on that at the end). Since I am also releasing a WordPress plugin to help prevent comment spam (which blogs coming up for queries like that probably encounter a ton of) and a very nifty little widget that helps turn image and bandwidth theft into links, I figured I would do all 3 at once. I promise, I am putting all of the questionable images way below the fold… so if you are the sensitive type,

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Network Solutions: Not Just Thieves and Hijackers, Now Using Tactics That Can Get Your Site Banned From Google

Keep your money, wallet, keys, and car... but give me that subdomain! Network Solutions apparently wasn’t happy just being slimy in the domain purchasing arena (see: WARNING: Do not check domains at Network Solutions by John Honeck for background on that one), and have now moved into the realm of not caring if they damage your existing sites as well.

According to TechCrunch, NetSol is now engaging in the practice of Hijacking Unassigned Sub-Domains, which put simply means

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Advanced Web Usability: 5 Important Lessons Learned From Digg

You too might grow up to design the next Digg.comIn the early days of the Internet, one of the biggest attractions was the fact that absolutely anybody was able to sign up for a free email account, and with it get their very own webpage. No design experience whatsoever was required for this… and it showed. Gaudy was vogue, and if you doubt me spend some time on the Internet Archive to see what I am referring to. With continued ease of use and the advent of cheap hosting, this trend continues even today. However, fortunately for those of us who are in fact design-challenged (and yes, in general I do include myself amongst the masses when it comes to a lack of graphic arts talent) in modern times we have leaders in the industry we can emulate when we want to learn how things should be done. Today let us turn to one of the Internet giants for our lessons in usability, to none other than Digg.com itself.

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Single Source Page Link Test Using Multiple Links With Varying Anchor Text – Part Two

Back on October 9th, I blogged about a test I performed that demonstrated only the first link on a given page will count as far as ranking purposes go. In the thread where the test originated, pops (of TOONRefugee cartoon blog) asked what would happen if the first link were nofollowed. Since I had no clue, I decided to test that as well. Similar test as before, but checking the use of rel=”nofollow” on the initial link, and adding in a third link as a control:

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