After another helpful exchange with John Mueller, I realized that I had been avoiding the inevitable. I needed to upgrade my WordPress version from the 2.0 I’ve run for a couple of years to the newest, 2.6. After reading about the installation in the very helpful WordPress docs and elsewhere on the web, I still felt intimidated, to say the least. The horror stories were rampant. But fortunately, we professors are pretty good students, and we know how to follow directions 
So, ta da! The upgrade went very smoothly.
John suggested running my sites through Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer, using Googlebot as the “User-Agent.” Before the upgrade, my blog site returned nothing, meaning it was invisible to Google. With the upgraded version, the blog content shows up just fine. So I would recommend using this site to check things on a regular basis.
Still can’t get the neat little Facebook plugin to work, so that will have to wait. So many thanks to John for his very helpful device, and I hope to see my site back on Google soon!
3 Comments
Michael VanDeMar · August 16, 2008 at 7:19 am
Laura,
I’m glad you managed to get everything upgraded without a hitch, and that Bad Neighborhood was able to help you find those hidden links.
I don’t know if you did a “clean” install or not, but in case you didn’t, if you do run into problems down the road I wrote up a tutorial on how to ensure you have removed all traces of the hacking relatively painlessly:
How to completely clean a hacked WordPress
Hope that helps.
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