Version 1.2 is not backwards compatible, so anyone needing the plugin for WordPress 2.3.3 or earlier will have to use version 1.1. I provided links to both versions on the download page, however, as I mentioned there, if you are not running WordPress 2.5.1 or higher then you are open to having your WordPress hacked. I strongly suggest that anyone who still has not upgraded to do so.

I am looking into getting off the blacklist, but until I do some of you may notice certain website returning erroneous 404’s, just so you know.

Also, today I spent a good part of the day modifying the structure of the tables that hold the data for the Google Multi-DC Rank Checker and Yahoo Multi-Keyword Rank Checker.

Hopefully those of you who enjoy the use of those tools will notice better performance on them now. Also, I apologize for any slowdowns the data migration may have caused today.

Thanks.

Thanks.

With the way WordPress is currently set up, attackers are free to use bots for a brute force style of attack that simply guesses at the admin password until they come up with the correct one. There are a couple of solutions out there, each with their own drawbacks. One solution suggested is to restrict which IP’s that can access the wp-admin folder via .htaccess. The two problems with that is that it inhibits regular users from seeing their user preference page once they log in (which is the default page a user sees), and not every blogger is going to be logging in to their blog from the same IP all of the time.

Another solution involves a plugin that sets up a secondary password using Basic HTTP Authentication. While this will thwart many of the generic bots out there, if a blog is specifically targeted it is easy enough for a hacker to code a bot that will send repeated attempts against that login method as well, and again it does interfere with non-admin users when they attempt to log in (which is really a pain if the admin requires registration in order to comment).

Login LockDown takes a different approach. Every failed login attempt is recorded, along with the timestamp of the attempt and the IP address of the user. If a user tries (and fails) to log in too many times within a certain time period, the system then blocks any login requests coming from that IP range until the lock-out is released. The lock-out period defaults to 1 hour, although that can be changed within the admin panel. The number of retires and the time period that they occur within in order to trigger a lock-out are also configurable from the admin section, and admins do have the ability to release an IP block manually (assuming of course that they haven’t locked themselves out ).

The download link for the plugin, as well as the instructions, are located on the Bad Neighborhood website, here: Login LockDown v1.0

One of the things that the tool does is to flag any sites that could possibly be in industries that historically have been prone to high incidences of search engine spamming, such as the adult and pharmaceutical fields. Not all sites in those industries are involved with spamming by any means, but even when they aren’t many webmasters like to keep a family friendly experience for their users, and would still prefer not to link to them. To help identify sites of this nature, the tool examines the anchor text linking to the various pages, and checks for parts of certain words within them, such as “adult”, “sex”, and “pharma” (among others).

Just because someone links to a page using the anchor text “Unisex hair styles back in fashion”, “Family Fun For Adults and Children Alike”, or “Problem with drugs? Call our hotline today”, and the tool flags the website because of it, does not mean that you will get penalized for linking to them. The tools is intended to guide you to areas you might want to look at, not to dictate who you do or do not link out to.

There are sites in every industry that are involved in practices that could make them undesirable to link to, which is why the tools does more than just examine anchor text. The tool also does checks such as looking for a disproportionate amount of links from blogs. Since most commercial sites do not naturally attract the majority of their links from blogs, if you are scanning say, a site that sells lighting fixtures, and that has almost all of it’s links coming from blogs, then that site may have gained them from comment spam. If, however, you are scanning Michael Moore’s website, then it is only natural that a large number of bloggers would link to him. Again, human discretion is still needed to interpret the results.

Thank you.

Thank you Donna for prompting me to fix it.

Each page that is scanned is stored in the database. If someone searches for a keyword, and then someone else searches for that same keyword in less than 24 hours, then whatever results are stored are searched first. Therefore checking a domain for the same keywords more than once a day will not yield different results.

Note that Yahoo! does seem to be pulling their results from a variety of different datacenters. Therefore the search results you get when you search on your machine might not be from the same datacenter that is checked via this tool, and might not exactly match from one search to the next. Also, this tool scans the results at a rate of 100 per page. Sometimes setting the results per page to a different number can cause a shift in what shows where.

As with all of the tools, any feedback is always welcome.

[tags]SEO, seo tools, Bad Neighborhood, Yahoo, rank checker[/tags]