Bad Luck with the Blog

My apologies for apparently spamming the geoblogosphere RSS feed this weekend. I’ve been having some issues with the blog. The first issue deals with some weird sort of remote injection flaw in Wordpress. Basically, some bot came by and inserted hundreds of hidden spam links into the footer of my page. I noticed this after wondering why my page was taking so long to load. I believe I’ve fixed the problem and it shouldn’t happen again.

However, as a result of this, Google temporarily de-indexed my website from their search engine! My top-5 ranking for the term “Geology News” disappeared. And so did much of my traffic. It was impressive (and horrifying) to see the drop off. Fortunately, I’ve been re-indexed, but my Google ranking took a huge hit. Ouch.

Secondly, a plugin I was using decided to misbehave, posting about 20 USGS related articles, which ended up making it into the RSS feed that we all use. Yikes! I think I’ve fixed that problem as well.

My apologies once again! Happy blogging!

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