Aaron Wall at SEOBook interviewed Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame. It's a great interview about how Matt got started and Aaron asks some really great questions.
Of particular interest, to those of you running older versions of WordPress – is the section about having your site hacked and having spammy links injected into your site. Matt mentions making WordPress easier to update than it is today – they are making strides in this direction, but in the past, it wasn't always as easy. That's why there are a lot of older WordPress installs that are subject to the spammy links exploit.
If you use Google's Webmaster Tools and you have an older WordPress site that has been hacked, you may see a warning something like this:
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines … This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party.
Google will then list some of the links they found on your site.
What to do if this happens to you? Upgrade your site, of course. Then you'll want to ask Google for re-inclusion. Matt mentions in the interview when asking for re-inclusion, you should detail what happened and I'd add that you might want to mention what was done to clean-up. According to Matt, it's a pretty good way of getting back in the index if this has happened to your site.
Other topics discussed included WordPress SEO, (which I'll cover in another post), Akismet, and Meta-tags.SEOBook Interviews Matt Mullenweg