I decided to upgrade my WordPress installation on this website tonight. I wanted to take advantage of tags, faster code, and the new administrative backend available in WordPress 2.6. Everything went fairly smoothly (except that my category names weren’t migrated, but I didn’t care because I was changing to tags) and I was pretty satisfied, but something was still amiss. My search engine rankings had been dropping for several months, but I had shrugged it off.
If your search engine rankings start dropping, something is wrong. Don’t stop looking until you find out what.
I wish I had taken that simple advice months ago. When I went to “View Source” in Firefox, I discovered that someone had hacked my WordPress installation and changed my template to include thousands of hidden spammy links. Not only did that inflate the page size, but it destroyed my credibility in the eyes of Google, etc.
Here’s hoping that the search engines will once again recognize my brilliance (cough, cough) so that my ranks rise again soon.
[...] my site and changing my WordPress template to include spammy links. I cleared that up (see “Does your website sell Viagra too?“) and moved on with life. But I began thinking: it has taken me months to recover from the [...]