tedster - 9:10 pm on May 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

The issue of the hacked blog - especially on Wordpress at the moment - is a major concern. Here's a related thread from the WebmasterWorld home page: Using WordPress 2.5 ? Upgrade immediately! [webmasterworld.com]

Blogs were supposed to be the "no-brainer" platform for the average non-tecchie to keep an online journal. Unfortunately as the various blogging platforms became widespread, the required level of brains and owner responsibility reached a higher level.

The web sharks smelled money and blogs became an irresistable target. First it was automated links in the comment areas (that brought us to the ugly rel=nofollow mutation) and now we're dealing with parasite hosting.

I'm glad to hear that Google is being helpful, as they can, but no one should depend on that. The issue is probably too widespread for them to email everyone they detect as being affected.

One interesting part of the report in the opening post is that Google did not remove entire domain from the index, only the blog directory. That kind of precision is quite welcome.