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 all links to Wordpress.org from the blogs I manage. I’ve also removed any mention of the Wordpress software, including changing the meta generator tag to:

<meta name=”generator” content=”Elliott Back 1.0″ /></meta>

I encourage all you to the same. Deny wordpress.org your pagerank and help prevent further abuse in the future.

Update:

Matt has an “official” response here: photomatt.net/2005/04/01/a-response/

9 Responses to “Links to Wordpress: Gone”

1. Zenith says:

   4/1/2005 at 1:05 pm

   Forgive me for not jumping on the ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ bandwagon, but I’m doing absolutely nothing until I’ve heard what Matt has to say.

   I’d like to think that I could give a person who has given so much and freely to the blogging community, the benefit of the doubt. So excuse me if I leave my links intact.

   Reply
2. Elliott Bäck says:

   4/1/2005 at 1:17 pm

   Yeah, everyone has a different take on this issue. Mine is mostly slightly annoyed that the links I allowed to remain on my WP blogs out of respect were being used for secret financial gain. Overt financial gain is fine, of course. Because I had links to WP.org, when Matt put up those articles he was damaging my page through those links, because now I associated to content I would not want to associate.

   Reply
3. Zenith says:

   4/1/2005 at 1:21 pm

   There is a suggestion I’ve seen on the forums that would solve that for you, and that is to change the link to point to the WP support forums instead, where the source code is and always has been clean.

   That way you can still support the project without being associated with any of this.

   Reply
4. Elliott Bäck says:

   4/1/2005 at 1:49 pm

   The link is still pointing the WP.org domain, even if not to that URL. Support links directly to the home page, so it’s not really solving anything.

   Reply
5. Nick says:

   4/1/2005 at 4:11 pm

   Maybe you should remove all links to any site that links back to WP then, and not show commenters links (which link to WP), and…

   Reply
6. Marco says:

   4/1/2005 at 4:23 pm

   Now’s a great time to switch to Pivot heheh

   It has an anti spam package that even comes with Bäck [tm] code in it!

   Reply
7. Elliott Bäck says:

   4/1/2005 at 6:38 pm

   Huh, Nick–that’s EXACTLY what I was thinking! I should find all the links on my site, and remove any that link indirectly to WP.org, and then take the transitive closure of all the links on those sites….and in the end remove the whole web….

   Reply
8. Nick says:

   4/3/2005 at 2:58 am

   hehe

   Reply
9. andrew says:

   1/19/2009 at 6:00 pm

   can you give directions how to remove the footer please

   Reply