Hi Folks,

I’m all for using the minimum amount of plugins for your Wordpress blog. Why is because the more you have the more updates will be needed.

Also, plugins can and do get hacked and exploited and having loads of plugins is more stuff on the list of “Things to watch”…  Talk about a time vampire!

In my free Wordpress report, “Your First Wordpress Blog” I recommended using “PHP Contact Form v.2.OWP” as your mail contact form. For some reason I stopped using this and can’t remember why on one of my blogs and then changed most over to Contact Form 7.

Instead of updating my report to reflect the change right now, please use Contact form 7 .

One of our members brought it to my attention about an issue with the other contact form. She’s a firecracker who does her homework so I’ll let her tell the story…

“First off, I love your ebook (Your First Wordpress Blog – The Beginner’s Definitive Guide). Nicely updated for wordpress 2.7. However, I think there is an issue with the contact form plugin you recommend from green-beast.com (PHP Contact Form v.2.OWP).

I had already built my sitemap and submitted it via google’s webmaster tools before completing all my individual page descriptions…not sure if that has any bearing on the following or not…

My new blog was indexed sometime yesterday (again before all page descriptions were complete).

Imagine my surprise, when I noticed the following ditty under my contact form url:

“Note: The input below should not be filled in. It is a spam trap. Please ignore it. If you populate this input, the form will return an error.”

Ummm…what the heck?!

On a hunch, I googled that phrase almost 31,000 sites were returned. After a bit of spot checking, they all appear to be using this particular contact form plugin.

I sent an fyi email to Mike Cherim, but in the meantime I thought you’d like to know as well.

Since my site was indexed, I have put my page description on the contact page. If I google the specific url for my contact form (not site:mydomain.com/contact, just entering mydomain.com/contact), I don’t get that nifty little message.

How often does google update that index listing? Is there a way to force an update for my site? Or should I delete the contact form and go with something else?

Isn’t this stuff fun?! Maybe more fun some days than others.
MizzCindy”

(Have no idea how often or when Google does updates. )

Thanks MIzzCindy!  Send me an email using my contact form above because I have a gift for you.

UPDATE:

Turns out the plugin is ok but I am still going with contact form 7 because it’s lighter code wise.

“I sent Mike Cherim (plugin creator) an email  asking if the plugin was hacked and responded with the following:

“It’s not hacked. Give that page a meta description and Google won’t bother with that. It’s just content on a page that Google is picking up on. No big deal at all.

Mike”"

Thanks again MIzzCindy.

Tags: contact form 7, spam, wordpress contact form