In theory, this is a marketing blog, focusing on search engine optimization, web analytics and other web marketing topics. So what does Wordpress security have to do with Google and SEO?

Well one downside of the extended web ecosystem is that the same idiots who jump the queue in the supermarket will try to exploit your good blog as a way to jump their way to the top of Google’s search results.

One thing is certain, you won’t be feeling very groovy if you have the misadventure of being de-listed by Google as has happened to several of my fellow blogger friends.

I’m not a Wordpress security expert, and I don’t play one on TV. That said, there are a few Wordpress security best practices worth considering for your Wordpress installation.

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By announcing to the world the version of Wordpress you are running, you greatly simplify the work of a hacker. Peter Westwood’s post documents how to suppress output of the Wordpress version number in feeds and blog posts. I’ve packaged his code in a very rudimentary Wordpress plugin which will hide the version number in blog and rss feeds. The plugin only suppresses the Wordpress version information automatically inserted by Wordpress 2.4+.

You may still need to remove any hard coded version information in your theme. Look for a line like this:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->

and remove it.

Installation:

• Download the plugin
• Unzip it to your plugins directory
• Activate it

Use at your own risk.

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Regular readers of this blog be warned – this article is about the internet infrastructure needed to insure Internet users are online in the first place. We can perform all of the search engine optimization (SEO) we want, but if our target audience isn’t online due to lack of access, our results are going to disappoint. Marketing professionals are thus warned: what follows is a look at a potential technical solution to the digital divide.

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