Normanski

Wordpress Version 2.3.2 Released

Sunday, December 30th, 2007 | Web Thinkering | No Comments

Just before the year 2007 ends, Wordpress has released an urgent security version with a fix for a bug that exposes draft posts. The versions DB error page can also be customized with template. It seems that wordpress 2.3.1 has a loop-hole where it can give away your current database’ table structure.

Included in the WP 2.3.2 version were the following fixes:

• sanitize_post and sanitize_post_field are very expensive no-ops 
• wp_list_pages - set ‘hierarchical’ to 0 on ‘include’ 
• Suppress DB errors unless WP_DEBUG is true 
• Custom DB Error Page 
• Limit post_password exposure in XML-RPC
• etaWeblog.getRecentPosts 
• query.php mistakenly uses is_admin() to check for admin privileges 
• setup-config.php, install.php don’t check for a valid MySQL connection

Google stopped supplemental results

Thursday, December 20th, 2007 | Web Thinkering | No Comments

Google has phased-out supplemental indexes! Could this mean webmasters will be seeing better traffic?

Initially introduced in 2003, supplemental results are second-rate index results for pages regarded as “poor-quality” by google search engines. This type of pages are those with few or no quality backlinks, orphaned pages, URLs with too many parameters, low PageRank, duplicate content.

This type of indexing had negative effects on the traffic of a lot of site since pages in the supplemental result were not crawled as often. Moreover, supplemental pages are not returned to search results unless there’s not enough results for a query.

Google’s Yonatan Zunger announced that they have eliminated supplemental results for obscure queries. Thus, results are now returned from the “main index” for every search keyword. He said that this would contribute to a better user experience since results will be more relevant and deeper especially for non-english queries.