Two tips to avoid Duplicate Content:
Robots.txt or Meta Robots WordPress Plugin

Do you use tags? Did you know they can bash your Google Page rank? But you can fix that?

Reading Graywolf’s blog, I was reminded to watch out for duplicate content issues and Wordpress. It turns out that the wordpress default doesn’t nofollow “tags”.

Because bloggers who tag posts tend to create zillions of tags, they often end up with exactly one post in a many individual “/tag/” directories. This nearly always create duplicate content, which is not a good thing.

You’ll want to fix this; it’s fairly easy. I fixed the issue by modifying my robots.txt file.

What’s a Robot.txt file?

The robots.txt file is a plain text file you place in your root directory. It tells robots not to crawl specific files thereby eliminating the duplicate content issue.

The robot.txt file for BigBucksBlogger now reads like this:

Click here to read more.
 

Tags:duplicate content plugins robots.txt robots txt seo tags WordPress

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WordPress Vulnerability:
Take a little time to check.

Seo Egghead has evidently discovered a WP 2.3.1 vulnerability HTML-tainting attacks. (The vulnerability evidently exists in W.P 2.1). The apparent application is to inject ads into bloggers older posts; these would tend to look like paid links. The problems for you would be a potential drop in page rank.

SEO Egghead recommends bloggers check their posts for insserted links to mp3 sites he has discovered at his site, and provides a plugin for this purpose.

I may be wrong, but I think you need to use his plugin. You should be able to get the same information by clicking “manage” in your dashboard, finding the big “search box” and entering ‘adshelper’. Then, click search. WP will return a list of posts containing links to “adshelper”. Next repeat the search for ’softicana’. If both searches return zero pages, you’re clean.

While your at it: why assume these are the only hacker-advertisers? Take a little time and search for words like “mp3″, “casino“, “mortgage”, “viagra” and anything else you can dream up. If you find anything, blog about it so other bloggers can learn and check.

With luck, if my suggested method of testing useless, and you really do need to use the plugin, Seo Egghead will pop in and tell us I’m wrong. (I asked at his blog last night, and I’ll keep checking for an answer .)

Are you wondering how I did?
I seem to be ‘clean’ on both ‘adshelper’, ’softicana’ and a variety of other terms I dreamed up.

Hmmm… Plugin idea
If these sorts of HTML tainting attacks are common, I should probably write a plugin that periodically scans all blog posts for a standard set of blacklist terms, plus terms in the users own blacklist. Monthly checks at all our blogs would let us catch these things and warn others. It would be an easy plugin… hmmm….

If readers do run this test, and any come up “tainted”, I’ll seriously consider writing that plugin. Meanwhile, I need to get through updating all my existing ones first!

Tags:hack security vulnerability WordPress

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Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3:
Option to follow trackback immediately.

I’ve updated Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Sort of. It turned out the plugin already worked for WP 2.3. However, I did make a two mods at user request:

1. Josh Spaulding requested the ability to dofollow trackbacks immediately. That function now exists.
2. Tricia identified a bug that appeared to sometimes occur when people left “names” with apostrophe (that is “‘”) in them. I think I coded corrected.

If you’d like the new version, download Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Unzip. Place in plugin folder. Deactivate the old version, activate this one.

If you notice any problems, let me know so I can fix.

A word or caution
Trackback spam can be particularly pesky. I have seen a rash of semi-innocent looking scraper blogs that post snippets of your content. I call these Daegan Spam. If you keep those trackbacks and visit later, you will notice the blogs get redirected to irrelevant thin-affiliate sites for commercial products. This causes you to link into a “bad neighborhood”, which is a bad thing.

I’m planning a tool to help us find these things months later, “just in case”, but haven’t thought through the best way to do it yet.

Meanwhile, be very vigilant about trackback spam. When in doubt delete.

In the “irony” department

I found a bug in “Hide Sponsored Categories Plugins” for 2.3. It only happens for categories that have apostrophe’s in their name. I have such a category. It’s the one for “Lucia’s Linky Love!” So, I’m currently running the old version. Needless to say, I’ll be fixing that bug!
Tags:dofollow Lucias Linky Love plugins WordPress

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