MickMel SEO

BlogStorm has an excellent post today about something very simple you can do to help protect your site.

The problem, as they see it:

Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.

I agree with them — it’s a substantial issue.  The bigger problem is that many sites don’t realize they’ve been hacked for a quite while; often they only realize it when their traffic from Google dries up.

If you get hacked, Google will stop sending traffic to your site but they won’t tell you about the problem.  However, you can build a few simple Google Alerts to notify you instead.  BlogStorm suggests you set up and alert that looks like this:

viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:mickmelseo.com

If you get hacked even a little bit, one of those terms is bound to appear.  If it does, Google will let you know about it very quickly and you can dig in and fix the problem.

I’ve used Google Alerts for a while now to notify me of any news items that might have slipped past my Twitter and RSS reading, but this is a new take on it.  It’s simple and effective.  Great tip!

I’m not brave enough to try it, but Wordpress 2.6 Beta 1 is now available for those wanting to give it a try.  The new features, according to boren.nu:

• Post Revisioning
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Caching of static files with Gears for faster Admin page loads
• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• XML-RPC API for changing blog options
• Better SSL support for the Admin
• Hierarchy-aware paging in the Manage Pages and Manage Categories admin pages.
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

If you decide to give it a try, leave a comment and let us know what you think of it!

For those of you that love the Google Toolbar, but have been missing it with Firefox 3, your wait is over!

http://www.google.com/toolbar

I figured we’d see it updated this week, since the public release of Firefox 3 is scheduled for tomorrow.  I also expect we’ll see an update to the Google Earth plug-in very soon, since it still doesn’t work on Firefox 3 yet.  For that matter, there are a lot of plug-ins that still don’t work on FF3.  How many will get updates this week?

About three weeks after RC1 was unveiled, Firefox 3 RC2 has just been released.  Get it here!

No word yet on what’s new, but I expect it’s mostly bug fixes and things of that nature.  If you know of any substantial improvements, please let us know in the comments.  Given how great RC1 has performed, I’m quite excited to fire up RC2.