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?

If you’ve been holding out on upgrading to WordPress 2.5 (or at least WordPress 2.3.3), Technorati is now adding some extra incentive. According to their official blog:

Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible. These links are still seen by crawlers such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox, looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”. Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are not affected by this issue; only blogs hosted on their own installations of WordPress from wordpress.org require concern.

Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.

It looks like all those people that aren’t upgrading their WordPress blogs (or have a dormant blog) are being targeted by spammers, which is causing Technorati some problems. As a result, it appears that these blogs will no longer be indexed by Technorati.

Is this really extra incentive? In my personal opinion, the relevance of Technorati disappeared long ago, but I’ve noticed that my blogs do occasionally get traffic from there. It certainly can’t hurt to have them indexing my posts.

If you haven’t upgraded to WordPress 2.3 yet, you will possibly be in for a shock when you finally do make the upgrade. In the WordPress Dashboard, it will no longer display recent Technorati inbound links. Instead, it looks like the WordPress team decided to halt their relationship with Technorati and hitch their wagon to Google Blog Search to display inbound links in your dashboard.

With Technorati dealing with some major problems and the outstanding pedigree of Google services, this move is not surprising to me at all. Google seems to have a better pulse on the blogosphere than Technorati these days, with less down time and better search results.

With that said, it looks like there are several that are slow to accept change, so a WordPress plugin was created for WordPress 2.3 users that will restore your Technorati inbound links. The plugin is simply called Technorati Links WordPress plugin, and once activated, you will simply have to enter your Technorati API Key for it to restore this feature to the main page of your WordPress Dashboard.

Update:  A newer version of the plugin has been released since this post was written.  It now replaces the Google Blog Search function and no longer requires your Technorati API Key.   Thanks Jeremy!