If you are reading this, you are one of the cherished few readers who know about Make Your Nut, because, at this very moment, this site no longer exists in the Google search index. This has probably been true for a number of weeks, if not months, but I hadn’t noticed it until a couple of days ago. Here’s the story.
A few months ago, a reader notified me that a number of spam links were appearing at the bottom of every post that appeared in his Make Your Nut feed in his feed reader. I checked into it, determined that it was a spam injection hack that affected older versions of Wordpress, and promptly did nothing to resolve it. I checked the feed posts every so often, and it looked as if the spam injection only affected one or two older posts and had stopped - I had never upgraded my Wordpress installation because I was intimidated by the process, and in my mind the spam injection attack had come and gone.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that traffic to the site was gradually decreasing. I had claimed responsibility for this in my own head because I have been busy developing content for The Best Food Blog Ever, and have not been posting here as often as I have been in the past. Less content means less traffic, I figured, and chalked it up to that. I figured that after the holidays, when things calmed down, I would resume posting on a more regular schedule and the traffic would resume.
Two days ago, I got clued in to the Google Webmaster Tools site, and signed up for it, adding my two sites. To my surprise, the tools showed that Make Your Nut was not indexed by Google at all. I did a search on Google for ’site:makeyournut.com’ and it turns up 0.0 results. I hopped over to the help forum for Webmaster Tools and posted an inquiry, and that’s when a kind soul took the time to look at my site in Google’s cache and told me that there were about a dozen hidden text links at the end of every post that pointed to teeth whitening products. These links weren’t visible to me, and they weren’t visible to any of my readers like the previous attack - they are only visible to search engine spiders and are an attempt to raise the target site’s ranking by having thousands of Wordpress blogs link to it. As a result of this black hat SEO spam injection, Google saw my site as a spam site and summarily blacklisted Make Your Nut from the index.
Flash forward two days later, and here we are. I have upgraded Wordpress to the latest and greatest, which was amazingly simple and straightforward after all (I did it on the couch, using the laptop, while watching the season finale of The Biggest Loser), and hopefully that has addressed the spam injection hack by closing the security hole. I have applied to Google for reconsideration to be included in the index again. And, until such time as that happens, not a single soul is finding any of this content using Google as a search engine.
So, that’s the reason for the new template, and I fully expect to go through a few new themes before finally settling on one, since I have a brand new, clean Wordpress installation. Hang in there with me!
And, totally off topic, it’s the final days of the holiday shopping season and you still haven’t bought stuff for your outer circle of family members. Now that it’s just you and me here, without the distraction of all of those wanderers coming in off of random Google searches, I can speak more freely and let you know that, this morning, I received an email from one of our sponsors that you may have heard of - Starbucks. And Starbucks told me that they’re running a 20% off everything sale until December 24. So, if you have last minute gifts to buy, and if you or your designated giftee likes coffee, and if you like Make Your Nut, I fully encourage you to click, click, click away at the link below and buy some stuff. It’s not like anything else is going on at the moment.






