Malicious WordPress plugin steals your admin password, and you didn’t even know ?

Malicious WordPress plugin steals your admin password, and you didn’t even know ?
How to find .edu backlinks pointing to your site?
Which is a better performing ad ? 125×125 or Rectangle ads ?

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 05:19 AM PDT

Now, how would you react knowing that the plugin that you had used for ages emailed your admin login credentials to the plugin developer and you didn’t even know ?
Scary – isn’t it ? Well, that’s just what happened to this blogger Sven.

Sven reports in his post that while experimenting with a few plugins he found that a plugin (Pushit) plugin actually emailed his admin id and password to an email.
Now, this could have been an oversight or a mistake but its a serously scary thought.

What can you do to make sure that your WordPress plugins are “safe” ?

Quite honestly, I don’t know of anything that will give us a 100% security but there are certain things you can do for sure.
1. Install and run plugins only from developers who have a good reputation.
2. Always test the plugin on a demo/test blog.
3. Look for plugin reviews on the plugin page(usually developers blog) comments, or elsewhere on the web.
4. Never install plugins not tested with your version of blog software.

WordPress plugins are great resources and probably one of the USPs for us liking the software as millions do. But blindly trusting all of them could also land us in trouble, just a word of caution to all.

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How to find .edu backlinks pointing to your site?

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 03:39 AM PDT

.edu backlinks are "supposed" to perform well in your link building strategy. And I think it makes sense because we know how difficult it is to get an edu backlink (meaning a backlink from a domain with .edu TLD).

Mostly .edu sites are universities or colleges and they only link to valid resources like wikipedia. So if someone linked to you, that would mean something.

Unfortunately, there's been a lot of crowd sourcing happening in many .edu portals which has been exploited by SEOs, who paste links in the vain hope of getting some link juice. These projects normally are blogs/wikis etc.

In my opinion, links from an open wiki (with .edu domain) is as good as a normal wiki only. I mean if everyone pasted their links on the wiki, Google would treat is as spam right ? So what good is it ?

Anyway the post is not about spamming the edu wikis. For those who are curious about finding the edu links pointing to their websites, here's the search query that'll help you.

Go to Yahoo and search for this replacing with your domain name.

linkdomain:yoursite.com +site:.edu

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Which is a better performing ad ? 125×125 or Rectangle ads ?

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 12:59 AM PDT

I've been trying to figure this out recently but in vain. The sponsored ads that you see on the right hand side of DailySEOblog are all 125×125 ads, a common format you see on many blogs. Reason why I opted for them are because most advertisers are aware of the standard format and would have the ad banners ready at 125×125 pixels.

But I think now the 125×125 ads have become "too repeated" and users tend to avoid them just like they avoid the old 468×60 rectangle banners. Call it "Ad blindness" or whatever but its a fact.

I've checked my stats for these ads (on the right hand side) and they have increased over the years because I've been introducing new ads often. Whenever the same ad remained for more than four months, things start to come to a plateau, which is bad.

What could be possibly happening with the 125 x 125 ads that people are avoiding it ?

- Same banners and even same sponsors on every site

- The format is very "seen enough of it" kind

- Sponsors fail to grab attention by not bringing in new/variety ads but repeating them

What could be done to revamp the sponsored ads viewership ?

- Bring in different and not-seen-earlier kind of ad formats.

- Bring in newer and varied ads, rather than repeating the same on every site.

What else could you think of ?

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08 July, 2009