NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

Smackdown: WordPress loser on security

I’m such a fan of WordPress, I’m speaking at the 2010 UK Wordcamp – and I’ve met Matt Mullenweg (founder of wordpress, who I found inspirational). In fact I advocate WP nearly whenever I can for small / medium sites.

The bits where WordPress are great on  is flexibility and massive community, so tons of great add-ons.

But where I work, we are obsessed with security and because WordPress is  moving so fast, every change on the CMS means a security review and every change on a plugin means another minor review. That’s fine, except it’s lots of reviews and so lots of time spend rubberstamping.

The other BIG issue is the security gap betweenWordPress and MT - the article explains it in more detail. I don’t have up to date info on WordPress and security holes, but I imagine it has improved a lot over the last 2 years.

WordPress V MT security

Another reason I’m not a fan of WordPress for enterprise blog / news publishing is that MT can handle hundreds of users across hundreds of blogs in a single instance of the CMS. Of course you can say that WordPress  MU will do it, but from what I can understand, its a whole world of complxity and hacking to make it work well. Forinstance, things like extensive role management are native in MT, in WordPress the role manager is a 3rd party addon.

With Movable Type as you may know, it renders static files with a few dynamic elements. In other words you get a server full of flat HTML files that don’t need a database to render them. Of course WordPress for the most part is dynamically rendered.

This is important because its nearly impossible to do a cross side scripting attack on Movable Type. This is demonstrated by their security record. More secure = happier ‘powers that be’.

WordPress gets upgraded about 3 times more frequently than MT and if you don’t upgrade, you are likely to get hacked. Upgrade = security review because its new. And on it goes.

So there you go…I still love WordPress, but for BIG multi user, multi blog I’m waiting for a little more maturity.

Pingdom put toghether this very cool infographic on all things Google. Amazing numbers !

All things Google

Click on the thumbnail to see the full sized image (580px × 3959px)

Fail? - no, just another way to pimp for marketeers

Ive read that YouTube is now spreading the auto-captioning tool across all YouTube videos.  So this adds captions (like you see on translated movies) to the video.

One interesting point is Google is using the assembled data and algo’s from its directory enquiries and mobile applications services to get the accuracy rate up.

Google are making a big thing of accessibility.  However the bit I find most interesting is how they now analyse a video, extract words have time stamps for those words and so can now use their word based algos to index the videos and include more relevant videos within their blended search results.

So now welcome to a whole new world of spam as marketeers  manipulate video to get into the hottest search results.

Google’s post on auto captioning

The Reg talking about it’s spread into all videos on YouTube

Noisy, but quiet at the same time

I get asked what is going on in SEO and where I think it’s is going and I have 2 sets of answers:

On whats going on?

Not that much if you are just a regular SEOer working on pimping your property. The tricks don’t seem to have changed that much over the last 3 years. There are no big new exploits to play on, its all just settled down and rolling along.

This is evidenced by looking on the SEO social bookmarking site Sphinn.com – lots of recycled stuff about core SEO housekeeping, but nothing really that new.

The new stuff is with Social, but from an SEO view, the only interesting thing here is how Google is leveraging social to connect the whole of the Internet as one giant social network. That’s cool, but not relevant if you are looking to punt out mortgage applications!

Where SEO is going?

1. Its here to stay and its becoming more and more important as the Internet becomes  more ‘socalised’ i.e. as web sites who care about traffic conform to certain architectural practices; These practices revolve around being index-able and bookmark-able.

2. Its dying slowly as the engines get better and better at holding out against manipulation from SEO’ers like me.

Of course this is ‘onsite’ versus ‘offsite’ classification of things.

I am lucky to manage a reasonably large SEO operation and I have access to stats across my SEO work and my colleague’s PPC activities. I’ve seen a slow and progressive shift towards users getting more comfortable with clicking the paid for ad, as opposed to the natural search listing when they are doing a commercial query.

Of course this all makes sense when you see the huge push on quality of advertising. Google know when users don’t really discriminate between paid and natural, they will have won the battle.

By the same measure, I’m seeing fewer commercial results within the informational queries.  This has a bunch of consequences, the greatest being a shift of money towards paid for as the easiest pathway to buying a product when you are ready!

So in conclusion, for as long as techies build sites in ignorance of the web ecosystem, SEO’ers will carry on patching up the damage. But Gaming the system for rankings will get a lot harder and will gently roll into online PR.

(Sorry…its been a long time since the last post etc – something i’ll comment on on another post.)

The end is not nigh - yet

So according to Search Engine Land Google Caffeine is a few months away from roll  out and we won’t be able to see which data centre its being rolled out in.

There are two points here:

a. In SEO, something BIG is most probably happening, but its like a slow moving tide where there are few noticeable markers to work off.

b. Google have learned how to manage their PR (sort of – ref: buzz mess up) and through obfuscation they will control the situation one small slightly visible step at a time.

What are we in for? I’m not sure really. Professionally its business as usual. I had thought of taking a very proactive stance and working the social media stuff, but im not that sure which bits will have greatest effect for Caffeine, so I’m just holding back to see what changes come.

My guess is that:

a. The investment we have made in making our little corner of the Internet a better place, will pay off in a big way as the algo gets to understand how to filter for quality better.

b. Seo will migrate to social engineering.  Social engineering, as in using PR to rustle up noise in the social landscape and align it will SEO objectives.

So its all change, just not quite yet and it will be slow.

I had been meaning to read the slideshare on how social Media affected the Obama Campaign.

Obama Twitters

Things that struck me about the Obama campaign….the lack of spend on social and how they used evangelists so well to get engagement with so many young people. (See below for the numbers)

So this leads me into my next point aobut Social:if the cause or brand is right, social will just take off (with a little push)

I really think this kind of social media interaction is critical for a brand…. the right brand. Having 1/2 million followers on twitter or 200,000 face book fans in your group does not necessarily mean real engagement. I think its very easy to think big numbers mean a wonderful dialogue with your community, when in fact it may jsut be effective marketing in play.

I also feel more and more that certain brands are ‘social’ by their DNA. And since social is largely self driving when a community picks up on a brand, i.e. they use the simple and effective stuff out there and just self organise. Its why I often find it strange how social media consultancies can charge so much for apparently so little, when as I say prominence in social will come from being and exceptional business and servin your customer in an exceptional way. the equation:

Good formula:

Be a purple cow + feed the conversation = manifestation of love of your brand within social.

Bad formula:

Be mediocre + No dialogue with your customers = pay for prominence and no love / engagement.

The Slideshare :

The definitive ‘silo’ blog post on presentations onsocial media

The slideshare on Obama:

Obama Media Spend

Brand Interaction Strategies

Social marketing

What brands can learn