Follow up on WordPress Automatic Upgrade

I’ve now used the automatic upgrade feature in the self-hosted version of the WordPress software on a number of sites I manage, and for a number of upgrades, and it has functioned flawlessly. It is so much quicker than doing it manually via FTP since the automatic upgrade only upgrades the WordPress files that have actually changed since the last version. In many cases, this might be only a handful of files.

I’ve also been using the automatic upgrade feature for plugins as well on my blog, and also on the blogs I manage and again, it has been working flawlessly. I’ve even got several blog owners confident enough to upgrade their own plugins. I know this is making me less necessary to those blog owners in a way, but then again, it frees me up to concentrate on the bigger issues and such.

Rich Irony at wordpress.com

I love irony, and this one is soooo rich. On the wordpress.COM support page for the visual editor, there is – or is supposed to be – a video at the bottom, but it seems that wordpress.COM violated their own Terms of Service.

To whom do they plead their case to get it restored?

It’s official: Google pays no attention to meta keywords

Matt Cutts of Google, and Google itself have now officially announced that they do not use meta keywords at all mostly due to past abuses, and with Google having over 83% of the search engine market share as of October 29, 2009, they are the ones you need to pay attention to. The breakdown:

1. Google – Global 83.13%
2. Yahoo – Global 6.84%
3. Baidu 4.38%
4. Bing 3.39%
5. Ask – Global 0.58%
6. AOL – Global 0.55%
7. AltaVista – Global 0.08%
8. MSN – Global 0.06%
9. Excite – Global 0.02%
10. All the Web – Global 0.02%
11. Lycos – Global 0.01%
12. Microsoft Live Search 0.00%

Matt Cutts also mentions that meta description does nothing to increase SEO, but if you have it, they may use it as the snippet in search results for a particular site, page or post.

Bottom line? Spend your time creating high-quality original content, use appropriate categories and tags on your posts, use descriptive titles and don’t worry about meta tags. They simply aren’t worth your time.