I have a lot of blogs. A LOT of blogs. I’ve been delaying updating them because I knew it would take forever.

I’ve slowly been updating my installations over the past week. For my newer domains it wasn’t such a problem because I could use Fantastico to update them … and since their newish they weren’t all that out of date.

However all my older blogs, including this one, moved servers twice last year and I lost the ability to automatically update with Fantastico when I moved the sites to new servers. If I’d done fresh installations using Fantastico to install WP on the domains and directories first and then transfered my former databases into the new installations I could have avoided this problem, but that’s not the way things worked out.

Oh well … I don’t mind manual updating the blogs. It just takes time.

I’ve had a problem with my blogs for a little while. My problems started back when the Bad Behavior plugin had a problem a couple of months ago. Remember something with the blacklists went wrong and it blocked people out of their WP installations until they either turned off their plugin or updated it? Well I did the update and I updated my Google Sitemaps plugin at the same time and ever since then I had an error message whenever I published an article (on 7 different blogs!) and I don’t think my do follow plugin was working correctly either.

Well now, along with updating this blog to WP 2.3.3 I’ve also updated Bad Behavior (it’s latest version is 2.0.13 if your keeping track) and Google Sitemaps ( Version 3.0.3). At first I thought I still had a problem, but I refreshed the permalinks and tada - it’s all working well again.

I wasn’t that far behind in updating Wordpress. I think this blog was 2.2 … so it hasn’t been that long since I updated. However, WP has done a lot of updates in recent months and between the problems I was having with the plugins and being behind in upgrading WP I knew it was time to upgrade. I won’t fall so far behind again!

So far I’ve updated 6 new domains plus this domain. Now I’ve got 7 blogs on Feverishthoughts.com and one on yet another domain to manually upgrade. It will probably be a few days before I’m completely done … sigh.

I don’t think that there’s much that Google doesn’t have it’s hand in these days.

The latest news is that we’ll soon be able to create websites on Google. The sites will run on Google servers and I imagine will be fairly easy to use for non-techies. By that I mean you won’t have to know much if any code to create a website of your own within a matter of minutes!

Here’s a news story I found that discusses Google’s latest step into the world of website creation:

I wrote a post the other day about a new spyware program called Spy Sweeper. Now I’ve found a news story that says that when we are searching the web we should be careful of what search terms we use while searching as some terms - particularly those used for music and technology related searches can cause us to encounter more sites filled with spyware.

Have a look at this short video to see which terms you should be careful of using when using search engines:

It seems that Google’s been busy doing something this month. A number of people on one of the forums that I hang out in have said that their sites suddenly dropped in PR. In some cases they went right down to PR0.

What’s going on?

It seems that not enough people are seeing changes in their site rank for this to be called an early page rank update. The consensus seems to be that Google is updating backlinks. Backlinks are links to your site from other sites. Apparently Google does mini updates of these frequently, but when they do a large back link update they are likely removing duplicates and or spam or splog site links. Perhaps that’s why some people’s PR ended up going down. it’s possible that they had a lot of splogs or spammy sites linking to them.

It’s hard to say what’s going on because Google doesn’t announce it’s updates, and tends to keep it’s formula’s for determining page rank and other things related to a sites listing in their search engine secret.