The chaps at WordPress have fixed this in their hurriedly released WordPress 2.9.1 (2.9 didn’t last long) but the damage for many will have already been done. Content is vitally important for SEO and websites need to stay refreshed over inactive periods such as the Christmas and New Year break. Scheduling content is one of the best ways of ensuring this happens, but for WordPress to fail at this oh so simple task would be a mighty pain.

WordPress had this to say about the ‘glitch’:

After over a million downloads of WordPress 2.9 and lots of feedback from all of you, we’re releasing WordPress 2.9.1. This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts. If any of these issues affect you, give 2.9.1 a try. Download 2.9.1 or upgrade automatically from the Tools->Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

Shame they couldn’t have tested that before releasing a new version that can cause posts to display that dreaded ‘missed schedule’ label in the dashboard – right before most businesses disappear for two weeks.

SEOs would add the Google created nofollow tag to links to pages such as ‘terms and conditions’ and ‘privacy policy’ pages so that the link juice, or PageRank, that existed on each page could be spread to more important, more deserving pages. This meant that if you had 6 links from your homepage, and 3 of them were nofollowed, the 3 that were followed would get a third of the PageRank each.

Matt Cutts now claims that the extra PageRank that would have been saved by nofollowing links is now lost in the ether, and suggests that webmasters take more time to properly structure their websites rather than adding nofollow tags if they want to pass PageRank through to important pages.

Whether you believe Matt Cutts or not, and whether you believe that the extra PageRank really is ‘lost’, it’s definitely worthwhile looking at new ways to structure pages and to make sure that unimportant pages aren’t featured in navigation menus. For this purpose we recently started using the ‘Exclude Pages’ plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to select pages that you don’t want included in your navigation, wherever pages may be listed.

So for example if you’ve used WordPress to create your Terms and Conditions page, and it’s appearing on your site in the navigation, this plugin can remove it from the list. By unchecking the box which appears on your ‘edit page’ section you’re able to remove any page from your navigation, so Google can’t follow it. This ensures that any PageRank isn’t lost in the ether, as Google seem to want to do.

Why the feelings of dread and doom? Because when a new version of WordPress comes out you used to have go through every site copying the files across, changing the config file and then uploading the whole lot to the server, before running the upgrade program.

However, those clever people at WordPress saw this was tiresome and installed a one-click upgrade for the whole blog. Now when the dreaded ‘new version available’ link appears at the top of the WordPress dashboard, you don’t have head to WordPress to download it and go through the lengthy process of upgrading all of your websites.

Just click the link, let WordPress do the rest!

Some of the nice features in this latest version of WordPress are a better way of managing your widgets, more control over plugins (including the ability to delete files from the backend) and a much more in-depth theme manager.

The guys at WordPress have done well.