About Me...

Welcome! My name is Tiffany Washko and I am a freelance writer, newspaper journalist, Internet marketer, mother and wife, and I am an avid environmentlist. My sites and writings primarly focus on the natural lifestyle and green living. It is a truly great thing to profit by doing what you love. Go ahead and read some of my thoughts on life, business, and success!

Mom Marketer

One of the greatest blessings in my life has been the fact that I can stay home with my kids every day and make a good living online. I set my own hours and I love what I do. I can get to all my PTA meetings, volunteer at my children's schools, and still be able to pay for that trip to Disneyworld. On this blog I write about my insights, stories, and resources.

Archive: Blogging

Wordpress Spam Injection - The Saga Continues

I have had a rough month being a WAHM this month. If you recall my blog was hacked and my search engine traffic was being redirected to a spammer site. I thought that was the end of it….but the saga continues. I have several blogs and of course they targeted my main blog (not this one)…my bread and butter blog so to speak. After I got rid of the anyresults.net hack I thought I was in the clear but I wasn’t.

A few days later a fellow blogger emailed me to let me know that his own blog had been hacked and spam was being injected into his blog invisibly. You could even look at the source code and not see a darn thing. He found the links by analyzing his blog with CURL and the links all went to my site…aka buy your viagra here and then a link to my blog…only there were 30+ plus links for all sorts of spammy products and drugs. Of course he went to my blog to see if I was the spammer who hacked his blog and of course found nothing..until he looked at my blog with CURL and saw I was hacked too. He was nice enough to email me and let me know.

I hoped he was wrong but since I didn’t know how to use CURL I couldn’t verify. Then I did two things to test. I went to Google’s Webmaster Tools and looked at the keywords they had indexed for my site and sprinkled throughout were the spammy keywords. Then I searched for “viagra and my URL” and TONS of links had been indexed. I was dangerously close to getting banned by Google for being a spammer and in fact I have met several people during this fiasco that didn’t catch this hack until they did get banned. :(

Also, via a tip to use CRON from a Mom Masterminds member (LOVE that group) I ran a CURL string:

curl –user-agent Googlebot + URL

This verified in a way easy for me to see, where the links where. I was still shocked when I saw them for the first time though. They all pointed back to my own site. The overall goal of this hack is get you banned from search engines…perhaps so the spammers can rank better for the SERPS you currently hold. They are knocking out the competition. Oh and they added new Adsense info at the bottom of the page, maybe even siphoning my Adsense commissions.

So…..the blogger who emailed me also gave me a link that helped resolve the hack. There is a lot of info there but only some of it applied to my situation. For instance some of these hacks involve code directly implanted into your theme files but my situation was a little different. My hack was disguised as a plugin and not one that you could see in the wordpress dashboard. Sprinkled all throughout my files I found what looked like image files or regular php files:

filenames “*_new.php” , “*_old.php”,. “*.jpgg”, “*_giff”

They were all coded hack files and there was over a dozen of them…back doors to keep open so the spammers could keep accessing my site. They would make a plugin run under the radar that would inject the spam links. I had to check wp_options in my database and see what was listed under active plugins…I found the culprit there, deleted the code and deleted what I thought was all the files. I also deleted all my users and there were a few suspicious ones there and I scrubbed the database. Case closed.

Or so I thought. A couple days ago I checked Webmaster tools again just for the heck of it and guess what…the hack was back. So I just cleaned it up AGAIN…and did an even more thorough search. I only found one file that I think I missed the first time but one is all it takes. Now I have CRON being run to check for spam injection links every hour on the hour and the results are emailed to me. It is a pain but I am not going to let this go unchecked again. Just today I think Google cleared out the last of the badly indexed files although some phantom keywords still show in Webmaster tools…I hope they go away soon.

Soemtimes it is not so fun to be a blogger and Internet Marketer…especially when you are being sabotaged.

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Hot New Plugin!

Just found an awesome new plugin. It is called Psychic Search. If you have a search form on your blog then you want this plugin.

Basically it keeps an eye on my visitors and tells me what they search for when they search my blog. It has already given me a lot of insight into the topics my readers want to read about and I have tons of new ideas in my slush pile. Awesome plugin!

Check it out

Stumbleupon, SEO, and Guest Bloggers

More of the 31 Day Challenge

I did want to back up just a bit and make a comment about the challenge to make friends on social networking sites. I had not really done that before. So I started with Digg and I now have about 125 friends and 14 followers. I used to get 2-3 Diggs on my posts but lately I have been getting a half dozen or more. Baby steps…but still something.

So on to new challenges….

Day 22. Ask someone to guest-post on your own blog. If you’re friendly with another blogger, invite them to write on your own blog. If your blog is more popular than theirs you’ll have a better chance of being accepted. A guest-poster can inject a bit of freshness into your blog and, most importantly, allow you to focus on tasks other than content creation for a day.

I have put out a call for guest bloggers or even regular bloggers and I am even offering to pay them. I got lots of requests for info but no bites and no submitted posts. I am not sure what I am doing wrong there. When I have more time I will have to think about how to fix that. Right now though I am not exceedingly interested…although I am swimming in product reviews and could use some help.

Day 23. Do some SEO on your blog.SEO can be tricky, but if you know a little bit about it, set aside a day to revise and tweak your blog’s SEO. Alternately, you can take the time to learn how to optimize your blog for search engines.

I would say my blog is optimized. It has tags, descriptions, applicable post slugs, keyword rich page titles. I heavily research long tail keyword phrases and my I usually end up ranking in the top 5 (usually top 2) for almost anything I aim for. I have been pretty successful in that area.

Day 24. Buy a $5 StumbleUpon advertising campaign for your best post.$5 buys roughly 300 visitors. If some of those StumbleUpon visitors end up adding more votes to your article, the result could be a traffic snowball much larger than the one you paid for! Before you start, you can read this post at ProBlogger on advertising with StumbleUpon.

I had never heard of this before…but what the heck. Let’s try it out. I created a campaign using one of my biggest money making pages and I spent $5.00 to have it Stumbled. I will let you know how it goes and what I think.

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