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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