There was a bit of news in the digital marketing world during the week of December 6th. The main ones we paid most attention to had to do with security vulnerabilities announced for various tools used by many digital marketers …
There was an incident related to Gravatar, a popular service that manages profiles across social media and blogging sites. While not technically a vulnerability, someone with malicious intent could access information that is not available in public Gravatar information. If you use Gravatar, you might want to check how your profiles are set up and whether you are sharing more than you intended.
In SEJ’s “Ask An SEO” column, Tony Wright looks at a Christmas-themed website to help determine if Google is the “Grinch,” or if the site just needs some updating. While this is a holiday website, much of what Tony shares apply to many websites that worked well in the past but have experienced steady declines in search ranking and traffic over time.
There was an announcement of vulnerabilities in the Apache HTTP Server as well as several Cisco networking products. This may not be an issue unless you are hosting your own websites on Apache. If you are self-hosting, check out this warning and update appropriately.
An exploit against the popular WP Hide Login WordPress plugin was also announced this week. As a general rule, it is critical to regularly update all website software regularly. This includes plugins, themes, and the WordPress software itself. In this case, if you’re running the WP Hid Login plugin, update it to the latest version immediately. The time spent doing this on a regular basis is insurance against the much greater time and expense needed to fix a hacked website.
