As I mentioned in an earlier post, this blog was hacked (because of my own stupidity) and I decided to just delete the old database rather than take the chance that I might miss something on cleanup.

I’m always working on a few sites and while looking at traffic trends and checking the value of the URLS, I found out that I had thousands of back links from Yahoo coming into ElginComputerGuy.com and according to one valuation site, this site was worth in excess of $14,000 owing in no small part to all of those Yahoo links in to me.

DOH!  I wish I had known that before I deleted all the old content.  Now all those links are invalid and I have to start all over trying to build page rank.  I don’t believe it was worth anywhere near$14K, but it is rather disheartening to think about all those high-value links that are now invalid.

I knew I had a bit of a following and was getting good traffic, but I had no idea I had all those great back links until it was too late.  Anyone have a time machine I can borrow?  I’ll return it instantly!

If you want to find out what your URL is worth, just go here:  www.urlappraisal.net

I got lazy about updating my blogs.  I didn’t post to them very often and I didn’t upgrade WordPress as I should.  I know better, yet I just didn’t do it.

As a result, a few of my blogs got hacked.  Someone got in and installed some malicious code.  My host sent me notification that spam was coming from one of my web sites and upon further investigation, they found that 3 sites had been compromised.  In order to protect themselves, they blocked access to those domains while the problem was being resolved.

Their recommendation was to delete all files in the domains and download the newest version, clean the database and then reconnect the new WordPress installation to the exising database.  That would allow me to keep my content and fully recover from the attack.

I decided that a couple of the blogs that were set up as an experiment weren’t worth bothering with and just deleted all the files and the database.  So I had one to repair and another that needed to be upgraded but that hadn’t been hacked.  This is the one that needed repair.

To make a long story short, the only blog I cared about was the one that was not hacked, but I ended up deleting its database by mistake and lost all the old content.  I’m now faced with two brand new blogs.   Oh, well.  I’ve learned a few lessons out of it – always have a backup of the database if you care about the old content and always keep WordPress up to date to avoid security leaks.

This blog was hacked and in order to be sure everything is safe, I deleted the old database and all the old files.  Welcome to the brand new ElginComputerGuy.com blog!