Wordpress.org Hosting Spam
This just in. Apparently the Wordpress.org site is hosting spammy articles on certain high-profit topics to attract click revenues. Since WP.org has a high pagerank, they get a lot of traffic, and thus a lot of revenue. The full story is at Waxy.org.
Here’s a screenshot of a given spam article page, to give you a feel for what they’re up to:
Bloggers are in outrage: Yahoo 360, SEO Roundtable, and Kottke all have something to say. VirtualElvis points out the technique Matt used to “hide” the links from regular visitors, a black-hat SEO trick forbidden by Google called “cloaking”:
The links are positioned -9000 pixels offscreen so that they are invisible to the human eye. But, Google sees them (all 120,000 of them), and drives traffic to those pages. Is making money this way ethical? Time will tell.
The most concerning thing is that it was hidden–cloak and dagger. If Matt / WP.org were honest about their advertising, I’m sure this wouldn’t have been an issue.
Update:
The register has an amusing piece: www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/31/cnet_weblog_keyword_scam/ Also, Matt has an official response here: photomatt.net/2005/04/01/a-response/
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2005 at 12:58 am and is tagged with cloak and dagger, black hat, theregister, human eye, google, kottke, pagerank, cnet, roundtable, outrage, screenshot, wp, traffic, yahoo, making money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on March 31st, 2005 at 4:50 am
Hi Elliot,
That’s not cloaking. Cloaking is where you show one page/site to the search engines spiders and another to the normal users. People can not find this through looking at the source code, as that page they are seeing is not the cloaked one. You can sometimes discover this cloaked page in the Google cache though, as that is the page the search engine’s have been shown. This is just having hidden text/links on the page, a rather simple technique.
Great article on Kottke, I’ve just linked that.
on March 31st, 2005 at 5:40 am
Hi Kino!
But, the technique *is* showing one thing to the normal users, and another to the search engines, just by CSS and visibility as opposed to PHP and user-agent redirection. It’s the same thing, just implemented differently I think. The intention–to get stuff into Google without users noticing–is certainly the same.
Thanks for the link!
on March 31st, 2005 at 9:28 am
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awordpress.org+inurl%3Aarticles&btnG=Google+Search
Looks like both Google and Yahoo! have actively deleted those pages from their indexes.
on March 31st, 2005 at 4:28 pm
WP has just removed the /articles/ stuff from its homepage, too! I thought they had a contract w/ HotNacho to fulfil, though?
on March 31st, 2005 at 6:39 pm
[…] Since it’s come to my attention that WP.org has been involved in unsavory business projects involving a misuse of pagerank, I’ve removed […]
on March 31st, 2005 at 7:31 pm
Kinda weird to think about this in connection to Matt’s late-February blog entry about spam:
photomatt.net/2005/02/24/at-spam-summit/
on March 31st, 2005 at 7:39 pm
The whole thing is really quite weird, but also quite understandable. The only problem with his actions is the cloaking and deception, otherwise hosting advertising to support WP.org would be fine. Personally, I don’t know what to make of it, except to remove all my links to WP.org. Since it’s open source, I have no obligation to link to them or anything, so I can reserve more real estate on my blog for myself.
But, I really like the product, and I think they should keep the advertising and just link to it directly.
on April 2nd, 2005 at 8:51 pm
[…] r the big fuss about diversity and classism in blogging? Take a look at this entry on the Wordpress scandal. In her article, Suw quotes: Matt Mullenweg (Autho […]
on April 5th, 2005 at 7:31 am
Hi Elliott
Yes sorry I should have been clearer with my definition there. The page which the user sees is *not* the same page that the search engine spiders see. This is why you can only discover cloaked pages by checking the search engine cached pages.
The code that was placed on the page was visible to everyone which would put it into the class of ‘hidden’ rather than ‘cloaked’. You are right though, the intention is the same.
Great blog btw
on January 20th, 2006 at 10:30 am
I ran into a similar problem with a client. Their current infrastructure requires a redirect, and it is done ethically and inline with Google’s guidelines. It would be very costly to remedy this situation, and their rankings have not been affected thus far. However, the developer put a div tag on the redirect page with “display=none” and provided text that was not being displayed on the screen. Google says “why have text, if the user cannot read it?” The client insisted that the redirect page stay completely white, and refused to put the text in correctly. To make a long story short; the client received an email from Google and was removed from the index 3 days later. After 9 days of emails, and phone calls to Google employees, I was able to get them back into the index. They sustained their rankings and ironically improved in some regards. The bottom line is text is meant to be read by the user, and any attempt to disguise or hide the text is considered unethical practice by Google and the other top tier engines. Don’t expect to get back into the index as fast as I did for my client. I luckily got in touch with someone that had a connection with the engineers. Normally it can take weeks or months to be reincluded in the index.