IrishWonder’s SEO Consulting Blog

It has become known on Saturday that WordPress blogs are under a massive attack run with the purpose of building the largest and most powerful ever botnet running on the compromised servers rather than hacked individual PCs. The common recommendations to prevent your blog from getting hacked is to have a secure password and change the name of the admin user to something non-standard. While the password can be changed in the WordPress dashboard that every WordPress-based site owner is familiar with, changing the username requires a bit more technical knowledge.

There are hacks shared by users on how to do it via the admin area: create a new admin-level account with the new name, log in using it, remove the old one. However, this is risky and cumbersome if you care about not losing your existing posts posted under the old admin user. I prefer doing this through the MySQL database that WordPress is run on. Here is how (this explanation is targeted at those whose hosting is Unix-based with CPanel and phpMyAdmin but the same logic applies to any other hosting setup where a WordPress blog can be installed):

1. Log into your CPanel

2. Click on the phpMyAdmin icon:

3. Select the database associated with your blog:

4. You need the table called wp_users:

5. Click Edit next to the admin user:

6. Change the user name for the admin user:

7. It is also a good idea to change the ID for the user in the database as the default one for the admin user is 1 and this often gets exploited as well. T do this, you need to go to the SQL tab of this screen:

Here you need to run the following SQL queries:

UPDATE `wp_users` SET `ID`= 'XX' WHERE `ID`= 1;
UPDATE `wp_usermeta` SET `user_id` = 'XX' WHERE `user_id` = 1;

Replace XX with any number you fancy (needs to be the same number in both lines), copy and paste these two lines in the query window and click Go. This will change the user ID from 1 to whatever you wish and change the reference from the other table mentioning it to the correct ID.

As I have posted on Twitter already, I am speaking at BrightonSEO this Friday (April 12th). The talk is called Negative SEO: Myths and Reality but as this is part of the “Lightning Talks” session it’s only 7 minutes so it’s designed mainly to shed some light on the existing myths concerning negative SEO.

Negative SEO has been very much in the limelight since the first Penguin update rolled out last year but apart from those who had to deal with it before, there is generally little understanding as to what it is, how to spot it and what can be done to protect a site against it (or if it’s even possible to protect a site against negative SEO). I’ve had a lot of questions and people have shown plenty of interest even after a 40-minute talk on negative SEO I did at ThinkVisibility last month, so I thought it would make sense to offer a workshop in addition to my talk where I could offer you more information and practical tips on the subject.

The problem with negative SEO for most people is that this is something they have never faced before so they have no experience handling these issues. Yet, this is a very real threat. I have been doing SEO security audits and negative SEO campaign investigations for many years, way before these have become buzzwords, so I have seen a lot of stuff most SEO practitioners hardly ever come in touch with. Through this experience, I can offer you better understanding of the problem and teach you how to approach it.

Because this has been a last-minute idea, we will only be offering a small 2-hour workshop, and with limited availability. But because clearly many of you couldn’t have planned your time in advance, this being very short notice, I decided to run not one but three workshops in 3 places: Brighton on Saturday, April 13th, London on Tuesday, April 16th and Leeds on Wednesday, April 17th.

Here are the details of each of these workshops:

• Brighton Negative SEO Workshop: Friese-Greene House, 15-17 Middle Street, Brighton, Saturday, 13 April 2013 from 12:00 to 14:00 – get the tickets
• London Negative SEO Workshop: Lawrie Cornish, 72-75 Marylebone High St, London, Tuesday, 16 April 2013 from 15:00 to 17:00 – get the tickets
• Leeds Negative SEO Workshop: ICS-digital, Manor House, Manor Street, Sheepscar, Leeds, Wednesday, 17 April 2013 from 12:00 to 14:00 – get the tickets

In each of these workshops, you will learn how to:

- do an SEO security audit to evaluate any possible vulnerabilities of a site that could make it easy to run a negative SEO campaign ,
- fix onsite issues that could cause problems,
- fix offsite issues,
- diagnose a possible negative SEO campaign.

Nick Garner of SearchWorks who has a lot of experience in one of the most cutthroat markets – gambling – will be helping me with these workshops so you will hear his take on offsite issues and how they can be prevented and/or eliminated.

You will walk away from these workshops with a hands-on knowledge you could apply to the sites you work on right away. The tickets are limited, as I said, so hurry before they all sell out. If this goes well and generates enough interest, I am looking into running full day workshops on this and other topics in the future.

If you have any questions or what to clarify anything, feel free to leave a comment or contact me by email and I will get back to you.

There is an abundance of blog posts, articles, guides and even conferences covering outreach and inbound marketing and guest blogging. This has got so big that it has become a new form of spam in its worst implementation. Yet, those practising guest blogging on a daily basis, as their main job, still don’t get it right more often than not. I used to get link exchange email spam, now things are changing. This is an email I got today:

Hi,

I have gone through your site and liked it very much. I would like submit
an exclusive guest post on your site. Since you generally publish guest
posts from different authors in your niche, I thought it would be nice if I
too had an opportunity to offer something really valuable and informative
to your readers.

I understand the need for unique and well-researched content. The post will
be “SEO or Web Designing” I would also like to request you to suggest any
topic, on which you would want me to write articles.

I ensure you that the articles will be unique and not published elsewhere
on the internet.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Mary

Let’s leave aside for a moment this email being not really as personal as most blog owners would like guest post requests to be. The targeting is so off! I mean, I can totally understand why they picked me up. They fired their tools, ran a Google query for SEO + “guest post”, since both terms get menitoned on this blog sure enough it came up in the results. Have I ever accepted any guest posts? Hell no! Except for one time I suggested half-jokingly over Twitter to a friend that he publish one here, I have never seriously considered the idea of opening up my doors to strangers posting. No matter how frequently (not) I post here, this is the blog that goes with my professional consulting site, the views expressed here are exclusively my own, and I am not going to change this any time soon.

This is the reply I sent to this blogger:

Mary,

No I do NOT generally publish guest posts from different authors in my niche, or any other niche for that matter. Do your homework FFS. Just because my site comes up for a search for “guest post” does not necessarily mean I accept them, it simply means I mention the words somewhere on the site, and by not doing any further filtering or checking all your catch manually you have no idea about the context in which it is mentioned, and thus mistarget me (and a bunch of others, I am sure). Furthermore, since you are this poor at doing your job, I have no reason to believe you can come up with a worthy post and hence, even if I indeed published guest posts on my blog, I don’t think your content would qualify.

Best regards,
IrishWonder

Automating your efforts is cool, I understand the need to scale them, how many guest posts does it take to rank a site for “SEO”? But hey, there’s another way to increase the ROI of your outreach campaigns: improve your targeting, and as a result improve your response/success rate. Ever considered this?

And even then, I still do not qualify.