Its been all over internet now, that how WordPress.org the homesite of the popular open-source blog WordPress, spammed the search engines!! 😯
Yes, as I came to know about it from JD, I was astounded. I couldn’t have believed that!! This was raised in the WordPress Support forums but that topic was closed by a moderator, then Matt re-opened it, posted his comments on the issue & re-closed the topic. He did the right thing by closing the topic, or the forum would’ve been overwhelmed with replies to that topic, but the issue is now plastered all over the world wide web!!
Now to the main thing, what Matt did that people are so uptight about?
I’ll just quote what Andy@Waxy.org posted.
[quote]
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. Here’s an example of some results in MSN.)
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.
[/quote]
Now you get it? Shocking, no? 😕
At the time of me making this post, I checked. Google & Yahoo! have removed the results from their search results but MSN still has 7231 results. You might be thinking that I’m pulling a fast one on you on April Fool’s Day, I do wish it had been the case but unfortunately it is not.
On 22nd March 2005, at the WordPress 100K Party, Matt announced WordPress Inc. or WordPress Foundation, whatever you like and has hired its first employee, Jonas Luster, who explains on his blog that he’s not being paid by Matt to work, and instead attacked the guys who reported WordPress.org’s search-engine spamming.
While I agree with Jonas on issues like the development of WordPress being costly & Matt having to pay out of his pocket as the donations aren’t enough, I strongly believe that joining hands with spammers is not the only way to generate revenue, when you yourself are the lead developer of a project that’s strictly against spamming & has worked to keep spammers at bay for so long & so fevereshly!! I know it, I’ve read every single email sent to the WordPress Hackers list when the guys were discussing the SPAM issue & how to safeguard WordPress.
And for your information, I’m not having a go at Matt. I believe that there’s more than what meets the eye. 😕 Matt deserves a chance to explain himself & this rather unfortunate activity he indulged in. 🙂
So lets see & wait till Matt returns from his vacation. 😉