Does WordPress 2.5 Fix Google Cache Hack?

I have spent the past few months working on a very search centric CMS that I could offer clients, and use myself.   So the idea of upgrading my WordPress is something I didn’t want to deal with.   I admit that WordPress 2.5 looked to be a great step up, especially since I was 3 versions behind with my personal blog.   But I have   a custom theme and some custom plugins that I didn’t want to break, and WordPress is not exactly well coded when it comes to upgrades.   But as fate would have it, the upgrade became more a necessity than a luxury.

About 2 weeks ago, I noticed some changes in my search rankings.   It wasn’t just a drop off, it was actually the wrong pages ranking for terms.   This of course caught my attention right away and I check the Google cache and found that someone had hacked my blog and inserted all sort of nasty stuff.   It’s interesting that I didn’t see this stuff in the page source, but it was being picked up by Google.   As a matter of fact, I think the only way I would have ever seen it is from Google.

So I asked my friend Russ to install the latest version of WordPress.   On the upside, it looks nice.   Media upload is much easier, the admin tool is cleaner, and most importantly the security hole seems to have been plugged.   I re-checked the pages today in Google cache, and it appears that all pages that have been cached since the upgrade are clean.   It will of course take some time for the entire site to get re-indexed, but all should be good by months end.

On the downside, my site is not a bit messed up.   My Asides are no longer…aside.   Most of my right column has been nuked, and a bunch of nasty characters have littered my posts.   It’s going to take some clean up.   Since I’m right around the corner from launching my new blog on the new CMS, I’m not really feeling very motivated to put the work into the clean up right now, so please bare with me for the time being.

[tags]wordpress, hacked, google[/tags]