A few months ago I switched my Feedburner account over to Google in order to try out their AdSense for feeds program (not on the WP Hacks feed, but only on a few sites I run that convert well with AdSense).  At the time, doing so was strictly voluntary.  According to a few reports I’ve been reading around the blogosphere the past couple days, it looks like everyone who hasn’t already moved their feeds to Google will be prompted to do so in the very near future.

Is this a good thing?  I suppose there are some advantages to having your feeds on your Google account.   So far the only problem I’ve run into since making the switch to Google’s Feedburner is the Feedcount WordPress plugin I was using, which no longer works with the new setup.  I went in and hacked the plugin code a bit to try to get it work, but it still wasn’t working with the new setup.

Anyone else having any problems since switching your Feedburner account to Google?

If your WordPress blog gets a lot of referral traffic, there is a WordPress plugin you may want to check out called Greet Box. This plugin actually looks at where referral traffic is coming from and displays an appropriate greeting message to your readers.

A popular example is Digg.  If visitors come from Digg.com, they will see a message reminding them to Digg the post!   If you have a Twitter account, you can also setup a custom message to show people visiting from Twitter reminding them to “Tweet” your post or to follow you on Twitter.  This plugin also works for visitors via Google search, etc.

For everyone else, you have the option of setting a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Greet Box Plugin Features:

• Compatible with various WordPress cache plugins so you do not have to sacrifice speed.
• Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
• Detect the visitor’s search keywords and use those keywords to display related posts.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled.
• AJAX greeting message in the front-end makes it compatible with caching plugins and WPMU.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
• Ability to setup regular expression rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages.
• Ultra customizable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prepend/append HTML around the greeting message box.
• Currently the following traffic referrers are in Greet Box by default (you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list):
  1. Delicious
  2. Digg
  3. Google
  4. Yahoo
  5. StumbleUpon
  6. Technorati
  7. Twitter

You can download Greet Box here.   If you’d like to check out some of the other WordPress plugins we’ve featured in the past, you can check out our WordPress Plugins page.

One of the things that has always made SEO so tricky is that Google doesn’t really comment much about search engine optimization techniques and they are always changing their algorithm, leaving testing as the only way to figure out what SEO techniques work.

Well, in case any of our readers missed it, Google has released an official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF).  It doesn’t release any of Google’s algorithm secrets, but it does cover Google’s best practices for title tags, meta tags, URL structure, navigation, content, anchor text, headers, images and of course, Robots.txt, making this a good way to review the basics and make sure you have that stuff down correctly.

Some of our long time readers may remember last April when we wrote a post about Technorati wanting you to upgrade your WordPress installation.   In that post, we explained that Technorati will no longer be indexing your site if you have an old installation of WordPress running on your blog.   This is of course due to the major security vulnerabilities on some old WordPress installations.   Unfortunately this announcement didn’t get much attention, as Technorati has failed to grow with the blogging community and has basically become irrelevant over the past year.

With that said, for those of you on old WordPress installations, maybe this will be a bigger incentive to upgrade?   According to Quick Online Tips, it looks like Google has begun warning users of WordPress 2.1.1 via their Google Webmaster Tools of the security vulnerability of this version.   If this is successful, Google will then expand to notifying webmasters of other vulnerable WordPress installations, as well as other blogging platforms.   Note: This does not affect WordPress.com users, as your sites are automatically upgraded for you.

Why is this important?  I believe that it is conceivable that eventually Google could not index your sites that are using a version of WordPress that are considered unsafe.  This is because these blogs are targeted by hackers and inappropriate content or malicious code is often placed on these sites.  Google does not want these types of sites in their index.

I know there are a few of you out there that don’t necessarily upgrade your WordPress installations.   Will WordPress 2.7’s easy upgrade process help you to upgrade your installations regularly?

Have you ever found that you are looking for a WordPress plugin that does something specific, but you’ve tried the WordPress Codex or using Google search and nothing has come up?

There are a few choices you have, including our quickly growing WordPress plugins page, but one cool thing I ran across is I want a WordPress Plugin to… , which serves almost as sort of a WordPress plugin directory.   Here you’ll find plugins broken down into categories, allowing you to click on the type of plugin you are searching for, then see what options you have.

[via WordPress Garage]