Yes. My blog is down for more than 8 hours. Traffic drop to more than half. It is due to I am too busy to check my blog. It is unbelievable that this could happen even I have a strong password and updated to the latest WordPress version. However, this security issue does not only affect WordPress but it happens to all websites even your blog is hosted on reliable hosting provider such as Hostgator.

Some sources said it must be one of the folder that is set to executable by public users. Then it is take granted by anonymous users that trying bring the site down.

Symptom

At first I thought it is caused by Hostgator shared server down again but it is not. The reason is that my other blogs are working fine and able to load partially.

It made me wonder why it works on one blog but not the other? As I dig deeper through the files in the server and find out a lot of random number PHP and htaccess files generated in every sub-folders.

The htaccess will point to the random number PHP file when the page hit an error document. Imagine when all of these htaccess separated into each sub-directories, it will force the site down in less than one second. How horrible!

Solutions

I have yet to find a good solutions to remove the unnecessary files generated by remote scripts. To resolve the issue quickly, I am about to remove all the suspicious files one by one by utilizing the FileZilla remote search files feature. It is slow but still acceptable.

After one hour plus of finding solutions and removing thousands of suspicious files, finally my blog is running fine again.

To make sure this issue does not happen again in the future, I also have change all the password, remove some FTP users, and change the permission of the folders that could be affected.

I don’t know the exact reasons of my blog traffic increase in a sudden because I have done many things to my blog during the Hostgator shared server downtime. I have remove two banners at the side bar, disable gravatar profile picture, apply for CloudFlare CDN and trying to make my blog as simple as possible.

Since Google consider website speed as part of the ranking, I don’t see the reason why it will increase to over 10%. What I know is that Google Panda Update is affecting many of the blogs and websites out there. Most of them getting traffic drop.

Most people complain their blogs are affected by the update even though they write original content. Content is still important but now Google is taking consideration of the blog layout. A simple and good navigation the blog can really help to make your blog standout from others especially for individual blog owner.

What to do when your site is affected?

Consider minimizing total number of ads on the same spot. Example having 3 ads on the header section. It may be good to separate it into sidebar or footer section. Don’t let the visitor feel overwhelm.

Things to remove: Tag clouds, having too many tags, broken links, spam comments, lengthy page title or description, and many same sentences repeated in posts

What you need to consider: adding more thoughtful and helpful analysis content, easy navigation at the top, revamp old posts, and improve your site loading speed.

Conclusion

There are many more factors that affected the new ranking. What I know is, in this Google Panda Update, you need to apply “common sense” into your blog. Imagine yourself as the new visitor who first time come to the blog. Do you feel confuse with the navigation? Do you think the content is helpful? Is the site having too many ads that make you feel bad?

I don’t know how long my blog can sustain the traffic at 1500 unique visitor per day. I should continue to write more genuine content to help people find to their information easily. It is happy to know that I am half-way to my target 3000 UV per day. Hopefully, I can reach my target by this year.

How about you? Is your blog affected by recent Google update?

My blog posts always get indexed right on the spot after it is published. Until recently, I am having an issue of some posts did not indexed by Google. As I look through the solution and found out that I have a lot of crawl errors pages showing at Google Webmaster. This is due to after I have revamped my blog design and remove unused links for better organize navigation.

Getting index as soon as possible is very crucial. It is important to make sure your hard written posts able to reach by everyone and new visitors.

Here I have found out that 5 reasons why a blog is not indexed properly.

XML Sitemap Generator is not working properly

This will happen when you have perform an upgrade to newer WordPress version and the xml sitemap plugin is not compatible with the latest WordPress. Making it crash and not able to generate sitemap automatically. In other words, it is broken. There is no solution for this unless revert back the old WordPress or wait for the plugin update.

Too many crawl errors pages

Make sure your blog don’t have too many 404 not found pages because Googlebot is unable to navigate to these broken links. Instead, Googlebot will stop crawling from time to time until you have remove the links manually from Google Webmasters or add the links back again. You can make a request to remove those links at Google Webmasters option. After the removed request successful, it will not show anymore crawl errors. Other unreachable pages issue can be solved by installing WP Super Cache plugins to speed up the performance of your blog.

Your blog looks like a spammer site

Auto-blogging will make your blog fall into spammer site category soon or later. Although some auto-blog site do link back to original post, but the post you make from automated tool does not give any values to readers and search engine. Google will treat your site as spam site very soon and stop indexing your blog.

Try to add the external links with meaningful anchor text to let the readers find information easily. Avoid links like “Click here” or “Download Here” whenever possible.

Lack of new content

Frequent posting is important to make sure your blog is still active. Continue to post more quality post to make your blog looks more lively with fresh content which gives more value to your readers.

Your blog is not important enough

Blog popularity determines the crawl rate of your blog. Most good quality blogs have quick page index rate and it is due to the reason GoogleBot has given it a trust. The total comments on your blog shows how good is the engagement of the topic that you have published. Write a lot of good quality posts to attract more new visitors coming to your blog.

All in One SEO Pack is a great plugin to fine tune your page automatically with Search Engine Optimization. It has all the SEO benefits that you ever wanted on your blog. If you don’t want to use this plugin, you can apply your own SEO also but what is good about this plugin is that it automatically apply all the required customizable SEO to your blog and make your life easier.

The latest version 1.6.10.1 make it compatible with WordPress Version 2.9.2. Well, I know most people wonder why there is always new upgrade release and the process is never ending. Some blogger may just drop it and rather don’t use it to avoid the frequent upgrade. New upgrade release mean there is new enhancement, bug fixes, security issues, and compatibility issues. It is always advisable to upgrade to latest version. What happen when your Anti-virus software is out-of-date?

Upgrade it automatically in your WordPress or download latest All in One SEO Pack now.

I have just upgrade my blog to the latest version of wordpress 2.8.2. So far I didn’t notice any problems or issues on my blog after the upgrade process. Upgrading latest wordpress manually can be a bit risky if you are not a IT technical person or an experience wordpress user. You can use wordpress automatic upgrade feature to let it upgrade for you if you are not experiencing folder permission write issue and unable to connect using FTP connection settings.

One of the reason I choose to upgrade my wordpress 2.6 to latest 2.8.2 because of the loading speed improvement in dashboard, posts, and comments page. Although, this isn’t apply to the front page of my blog but it could save a little time by loading faster admin page. This is especially useful and the end results will be more for low connection user such as my house area.

The plugins management page has been simplify by grouping active and inactive plugins together on the same page. This feature is already exists in version 2.7 but since I have skip version 2.7, I can experience this feature in the latest wordpress 2.8 only.

So, what new features will be available in version 2.9? They have started to work on wordpress 2.9 and let’s see what new improvements are added to wordpress

NOTE: Upgrading now is not a good choice for blogger who are play-safe type. Wait until a stable version release

Comment Spammer bots are getting smarter nowadays and it can break through Akismet checking. The content of the comment is really look like a real human comment but the fact is spammer bot is always a spammer bot. Humans are always smarter and clever than a bot no matter how smart the bot is although human does make mistake sometimes. It is simply mean spam bots can be catch 100% with our experience in blogging and a powerful tool we can use like Akismet plugin. A few simple steps on how to identify a spam comment bots are as below :

Installed a spam blocking plugin like Akismet

Akismet can block most of the spam comments up to 95% and the smart comment can break through Akismet’s tracking. We will need to manually identify it and mark it as spam comment.

Spam comment usually irrelevant to the topic

If your topic post is about making money online but the spam comment about good traffic tips you have provided. The difference of topic and comment post can be seen by our eyes clearly.

Spam comment that uses our human psychology

Some smart comment didn’t want to mention something about your topic post in order to make sure the comment does look real. Example like “Great post. I have read your other posts and subscribe in my Google Feed Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you in the future”. We can do a search in google and similar comment contents are exists everywhere in other blogs.

Spam bots website content don’t have a good quality posts

Most of the time, their website content don’t have much posts and just a few post. Usually the topics are mention about how much money they make online with good testimonials and asking people to join or trying to promote their products online.

If you have read my earlier post on how to post in advance and you have hit an error message as above, this is a guide on how to fix the problem. When you received an error message “Missed Schedule”, you are either having web server settings issue or you are using WordPress 2.7

Basically, this is an error of different time in web server and WordPress time since it must match in order to get the post published correctly. If you are using WordPress 2.7, you can overcome this issue by modify the wp-cron.php in root folder.

• Open the file in notepad and search for the line with the code update_option(‘doing_cron’, 0);
• Change it to //update_option(‘doing_cron’, 0);
• Save the file and upload to the web server.

For WordPress 2.6 version, you can go to Bloghighlight to view the detail step by step instructions. Please make sure you have ready my post on “Practice to Write Posts In Advance” before continue