Wow, absolute mayhem as WP is outed as doing some serious ‘cloaking’ serach enginewise, basically the story runs like this:
“The Problem. 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
120,000168,000 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.)” [Waxy.org]
Such a difficult one to call, should be in the textbooks!
Personally I reckon that first up it’s Google’s fault (this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible) but I have to admit I’m pretty uncomfortable with it. Well, OK, very uncomfortable. It’s a crappy thing to do. Think we should hear Matt out first though.
(here’s the comment I left:
“Let’s hear what everyone involved has to say before going too off the wall. It looks like a dumb move but I know for a fact I’ve made far far dumber.
It is his site, he has put in god knows how much work, he wants to take it forward and who here hasn’t done well out of ‘dishonest’ means before (like lying on CVs, being ‘strategic’ etc.)?
Or has everyone here never done anything wrong or underhand?
So let’s see what everyone has to say and cut the puratanical crap right :o)”)
[I know, it’s tame to leave smilies after saying ‘crap’ isn’t it ;o]