This morning, we have a guest post from our friend Jeff Orloff who’s been contributing to SEOgadget on subjects such as “What Google’s Chrome OS Means for the Future of Computing“, and using “Ubuntu in the Office“. Today, he’s looking at the dark art of SQL Link Injection, how to test to see if your WordPress installation suffered this ill fate and ways to mitigate the risk. Over to you, Jeff…
Having written extensively on SQL injections and cross-site scripting injection techniques, I was not surprised in the least bit when I read an article describing how a link injection works. Read the full post...
We’ve all seen hacked WordPress blogs. Right? Most SEO’s and techies in our beloved industy certainly have, but WordPress blog hacking is a relatively unknown subject to the less tech savvy blogger and, unbeknownst to them, their cherished weblogs are linking out to some pretty disgusting parts of the Internet…
About a year ago, I was looking at some rankings for the keyphrase “airline tickets”. Kicking around page 2 in Google.com, I saw a result that instantly stood out as anomalous. Looking at the backlinks, it was pretty clear that an entire legion of WordPress blogs had been hacked to link out to a spam site. One of those WordPress blogs belonged to Rob Da Bank, a DJ who I (sort of) worship, so I contacted him: Read the full post...
This evening I’ve been playing with the WP-cache plugin. If you install it and find this error:
Then all you have to do is browse to the wp-cache config file which you should find in the /wp-content/ directory.
Take a copy of the file and open it to edit as follows:
Done. Of course you could try the WP-super-cache plugin, which is an improvement over this one – but brings a new set of potential problems. On first install my entire site started delivering blank HTML. Be careful 
Over the last day or so I’ve been tweaking SEOgadget to load a little faster on page refreshes. It was getting quite slow with all of the conditional routines and server requests in this theme. The Ubuntu category targeted adsense blocks were the final straw, with the entire sidebar being such a dog that the rest of my page load performance was terrible. Most of my performance optimisation work focused on improving the sidebar and header but there are still lots of other areas to improve. If you’re interested, check out Joost’s excellent tips on how to speed up and clean your WordPress.
Dynamic title tags Read the full post...
Here’s a useful tip for anyone who uses the wp-sphinnit plugin on a WordPress blog that covers more than just SEO. Want to display the Sphinnit button on an SEO post but not on posts unrelated to SEO?
First of all, make sure you’ve set “align” to “none” in the Sphinnit options, or you’ll have two Sphinnit logos appear on every SEO post after implementing this code!
Next, you need to edit your single.php file and use a conditional tag before calling the wp-sphinnit plugin. You’ll need to insert the following code before “the_post”:
Read the full post...
How to display latest posts from a specific category without a plugin in WordPress
I’ve just made an addition to my side bar that displays all of the latest items added to my SEO jobs category. It’s a few, simple lines of code and doesn’t nessecary warrant an entire plugin! Here’s how to do it – just insert the code below, and change the category=1 argument to the category number of your choice:
<ul>
<?php
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts('numberposts=5&offset=1&category=1');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul> Read the full post...
Add a jobs board listing to WordPress with plugins, themes, or your own code!
A few weeks ago I launched my SEO jobs page. Since I started SEOgadget I’ve wanted to build something that resembled a basic “jobs board” to complement my blog, owing to the fact that a lot of my time over the past few years has been spent on recruitment SEO. Now that my internal linking campaign is over, let’s get on with the post… Read the full post...
One of the new features on my blog is a popular posts section in the sidebar. It’s now very easy to do this yourself. Here’s how:
1) Download and install the “Post Plugin Library” from here and activate it. This plugin does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins.
2) Now download and install the “Popular Posts” plugin from here. Activate the plugin too.
You’ll now have a “Popular Posts” option in your settings menu. The options are pretty clear – here’s a screenshot of the admin screen:
Read the full post...
