Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam
by Volker Weber
This could turn into a nightmare:
Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he's been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here's a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Or try this search tool, which searches multiple Google datacenters.)
Why Wordpress? The Wordpress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8/10, largely because every Wordpress-powered blog links to the Wordpress homepage by default. The high pagerank affects their ranking in Google search results, making context-sensitive Google ads very profitable. This, in turn, makes Wordpress very attractive to advertisers.
Comments
Matt has really just one choice now: to be open and put his cards on the table. Any other way leads to a big loss of image.
due to "illegal" SEO tricks Google - as it seems to me - kicked wordpress out from the Google Index... try it out in Google... no more wordpress.org and if you call wordpress.org you will see that the pagerank is zero... oh my...
This reminds me of an old (pre-internet) joke:
1 - "I'm of thinking of tracing my family tree and history, but it's too expensive"
2 - "You want your family history for free? Just run for public office"
If you are going to do something sneaky, don't do it on the web...
I use WordPress, and as I posted in my (WordPress) blog, this just proves that open source is clearly not the right model for everything - even if you don't want to make money. If you've got expenses, you need to figure out how to deal with them in a way that maintains your dignity. Because, in the end, especially amongst open source aficionados, your reputation is everything.
