Old Software Can Hurt Search Rankings

Old Software Can Hurt Your Rankings

Posted by John Carcutt
April 8, 2008

This site is run on WordPress. I have to admit that in the past I have not been the most pro-active when it came to keeping my WordPress software up to date. As a matter of fact I am still one version behind (more about that later). How can this hurt my rankings you ask? Easily, via security hole exploitation by hackers.

Here are a couple of examples of how exploited security holes can influence your search engine rankings.

Hacked Content

I consult for a number of clients on blogs and social media. One such client recently called me about a notice she received about “Phishing” activity on her site. It turns out that her old WordPress version (2.3.2) had been exploited and someone had added a Bank of America Phishing landing page to her site without her knowledge. We of course removed it immediately and updated her software.

If she had never received the notice, she would have gone on blissfully unaware of this hacked content on her site. If the search engines had located the Phishing landing pages, they may have deemed her site un-trustworthy and possibly even penalized her rankings because of it.

Reduction of In-Bound Links

Blogs live by sharing content and links. One of the most important ways to push your content out to other bloggers and the internet itself is via the major blog engines. Technorati.com is probably the top blog specific search engine. Technorati has recently stated they will no longer index blogs with security ridden issues.

“Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.”

Not being indexed in Technorati or the other engines will make your content much less visible to others and reduce the number of natural in-bound link you can acquire. Fewer in-bound links means lower search engine rankings.

What Software is affected?

The simple answer is “All of them”. However, to be more precise, any software which has documented security flaws that are actively being exploited by hackers.

The best thing to do is to keep your software updated to the most secure and stable version. That said, I have not upgraded to WordPress 2.5 yet as there are still a number of issues with compatibility to templates/plug-ins and as of yet, any security holes are not being exploited so far. So I can only hope the incompatibilities with be fixed before any new exploits are discovered.

Always remember, links and content are not the only things that influence your rankings.