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April 7, 2008

Technorati Trying Tough Love With Broken Blogs

WordPress might be one of the most drop-dead simple upgrades going, but there are still a lot of aging WordPress installs out there showing symptoms of a vulnerability that allows malicious types to hide spam links on blogs such that they can't be seen through casual observation.

Spam links aren't there to be read, of course. Not by humans, anyhow. They're there to be crawled by search engine spiders, lending the credibility of an inbound link to some shady enterprise.  So I think I'm in favor of Technorati cutting negligent bloggers off at the knees:

"Because of this ongoing problem, we're discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven't been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) -- this has been reported by many WordPress users."

Maybe they should extend the ban to cut off anyone with an outdated version, regardless of whether their site seems to be compromised or not. It's not like Technorati juice is some kind of entitlement.

Posted by mhall at 11:39 PM | Add Comment