Technorati Wants You to Upgrade WordPress

If you’ve been holding out on upgrading to WordPress 2.5 (or at least WordPress 2.3.3), Technorati is now adding some extra incentive. According to their official blog:

Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible. These links are still seen by crawlers such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox, looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”. Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are not affected by this issue; only blogs hosted on their own installations of WordPress from wordpress.org require concern.

Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.

It looks like all those people that aren’t upgrading their WordPress blogs (or have a dormant blog) are being targeted by spammers, which is causing Technorati some problems. As a result, it appears that these blogs will no longer be indexed by Technorati.

Is this really extra incentive? In my personal opinion, the relevance of Technorati disappeared long ago, but I’ve noticed that my blogs do occasionally get traffic from there. It certainly can’t hurt to have them indexing my posts.