Ack, Bad Wordpress!
In a rather unexpected turn of events, Wordpress was recently found to be guilty of spamming Google and other search engines. Through clever CSS cloaking, Wordpress used its high pagerank (as every WP blog links back to Wordpress.org by default) to draw visitors to a large number of shady articles. Reading it over, I’m not surprised or really critical of Matt’s decision to try to make money off advertising on the Wordpress site. I built Adsense ads into the Sea Slugs! Anime Blog and while I am not making huge dollars, it helps pay for some of the costs of maintaining the site. Open source software is not the most lucrative of endeavors, and if advertising dollars can make the product better, I’m all for it. The worst part is that any backlash against Wordpress, whether through popular opinion or search engine retaliation, will only hurt innocent Wordpress users, and that is something that Matt should have realized ahead of time. Plus, when you look at the code… well, it really was pretty sketchy.
I tried to dredge up some threads from the support forum, but the moderators are closing every meaningful thread about the article. They claim that it’s because the support forum is not the right place for the discussion, but I completely disagree. So far, this is one of the only ones that has survived.
If this story had broken a day later, I could have at least hoped it was an April Fool’s joke… The worst part of it really is that Wordpress has devoted so much to publicly fighting annoying spam, but behind the scenes, it was guilty of keyword spamming and cloaking T_T.
On the flip side, you’d think Google would have learned to ignore that kind of simplistic coding by now.
Wordpress Stuff | Kabitzin 3/31/2005
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By Velius, 3/31/2005 @ 6:34 pm
Ahh, Hypocrisy at it’s best. Then again the people who are well-versed in fighting spam are often the ones who have the ability to cleverly hide spam in places they hope people won’t find. Kinda like the dark side of the force…. okay too much KOTORII
By David, 3/31/2005 @ 7:56 pm
Yeah, it’s weird how much flak this is generating — Wordpress is supposed to be a white-hat company (as compared to Moveable Type, which is distinctly corporate/black-hat) . . . However, I suppose this was inevitable — individuals donations can’t support an employee, and commercial use is out of the question — advertising strikes a pretty good middle ground. Eh. I hope this doesn’t turn off developers, because Wordpress plugins are literally *light-years* beyond anything offered by either Moveable Type or Blogger.
PS: Word to KOTORII