Slashdot Mirror
Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming
The Real Nick W writes "Wordpress, an incredibly popular Open Source Blogging system was found to be spamming google by inserting hidden links to junk content on high paying Adsense keywords such as mesothelioma and debt consolidation. Following Threadwatch picking up the story an anonymous Google rep appeared in the original thread admonishing bloggers not to use sneaky tactics to rank highly for "duplicate content" such as the 100,000 hidden articles on the Wordpress site. The articles have now dissapeared from Google and it remains to be seen whether Google will ban Wordpress outright as they tend to do when SEO's and web dev's pull these kinds of stunts."
"Mesothelioma"? It's a cancer, I guess (or so Google says), but not one I've ever heard of. How did that get to be an expensive adsense word?
This flies in the face of science.
... googling something will turn up nothing. But it will do it in 0.073 seconds!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
This leads me to wonder: what about blogger.com? There's just as much dubious "blogging" going on there as anywhere.
I Want To Believe
I search google for mesothelioma about once a week (from various proxies) and click on an adwords ad just to screw some lawyer out of $40 (which is what a click on that keyword costs.)
Although it's good that Google's taking a step in the right direction by trying to keep their index clean, there are lots of sites who try to spam the index. SEO is a huge 'industry'. Cracking down on some of the big perpetrators is a good start, but more needs to be done if Google wants to maintain (and even improve) the quality of their searches.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
lawyers.
I work for an SEO company, and we hear about all the sneaky tricks, but it isn't all that hard to be optimized while not pulling sneaky attacks. Google has a very complicated algorithm that take a lot of things into effect. The reason that they rank pages that have certain characteristics, is because those pages can actually be good, they don't have to be sneaky. A very closely monitored network of domains, can get a very high page rank. One need not revert to sneaky tactics to do well.
Damn bloggers...
This is why I love Google. They approach problems in an intelligent manner.
Problem: Spammers are very obviously trying to muck with our results.
Solution: Block said spammers.
The only problem is that it's hard to notice all but the most egregious offenders.
I've love Google to add a link to the standard search results. Something like "Report Spam." If enough (100k, a million, whatever) unique people/IPs reported a site or result, it would be flagged for human review.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Team Google: Internet Police!
It's almost like ceasing to exist on the Web.
I just ordered mesothelioma from a Greek diner!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Does the fact that they're OSS-based make them immune to rules?
Shall we let some spammers go wild just because they might be using sendmail?
I say ban their ass.
If I were in their shoes and if I were the kind of person to do so, my tactic would be to send a message to Google by rallying the blogosphere behind me to Google-bomb those keywords. Though if this becomes big news, the articles themselves will have taken care of that.
I should mention that I've had problems with the Adsense group before, and would like to see terrible things happen to them.
They had a high google rank, and profited(/broke even?) on it by breaking google's terms of service.
Not too surprising that google did something about it.
I use wordpress on my blog. And i get a loads of comment spam that use keywords similar to the spam that the wordpress website was hosting.
I wonder if the wordpress website maintainer has aided the creation of spam bots to identify worpress users and post on thier sites using weaknesses of the default install.
Is this one case where forking isn't a bad thing?
By banning sites, this may do more to hurt the searchers than the sites perpetrating the abuse. There may be some legitimate information on a site that is not found because of the ban. It seems that a smarter tactic would be to set the ranking algorithm not to rank based on links from an abusive site.
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
Search for mesothelioma and then use Linky to open all links, including ad word links, in tabs. E-Z!
sulli
RTFJ.
I use wordpress on my blog.
And i get a loads of comment spam that use keywords similar to the spam words that the wordpress website was hosting.
I wonder if the wordpress website maintainer has aided the creation of spam bots to identify worpress users and post on thier sites using weaknesses of the default install.
--
What is the sound of this sentence?
you would shortly have SEDO (search engine de-optimizer) specialists who charge you to sic their botnets on your competition... no thanks.
The screener said she calls back about 75% of the qualified resume she receives. She said she would ask me three questions, and if I could answer 2, I would move on in the interview process. The process is - screen (today), phone interview (45 minutes), 2nd phone interview (45 minutes), then a trip to Mountain View CA for an 8-hour interview.
I had to answer two of the following 3 questions:
Q1: What's the running time for Quick sort? A1a: Average case = n log (n). A1b:Worst Case is n-squared.
Q2: Assuming speed is most important, and umlimited memory, what's the FASTEST way to tell how many bits are ON in a 32-bit value? A1: Perform an array lookup using the 32-bits as an index into a pre-computed array.
Q2b: Suppose you didn't want to waste so much memory... A2b: Break the 32 bits up, say, into 4 8-bit values, and perform 4 lookups into a 256-entry array. Add the 4 numbers together.
Q3: What power of 2 is closest to 2 Billion. A3: 2^31
Interestingly, this was for a MANAGER position!
OK.. so, on to the next interview. Stand by for more info next week!
Google : You are cheating!
Wordpress : Here is 1000000$US
Google : You are so kind!
It will come... oh yeah...
No sig for now.
But I have to admit, thus far, Google has used intelligence, fairness, and equality to counter situtations. They've been quick to fix problems with their software (we remember the Google bugs earlier this year).
:) I'm sure persistance is a redeeming quality at Google -- they are persistent in making a quality product and service, with great efficiency and management of the EVIL spammers :)
If I wasn't so Linux-stupid, I would be applying there on a daily basis
Kudos Google!
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
as posted by "Podz" on the Wodpress forums.
"There will be no discussion of the matters raised in the linked article above here. As puppy18 has said, this is a support forum.
Any threads about this will be deleted.
This is NOT an attempt to stop news or prevent discussion - it really is the case that this forum just is not the place for such a discussion to happen. "
It's not hard to be optimized when your content is optimal.
When your content is useless fucking spam, you've got to use dirty tricks.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Can we assume that WordPress **users** are not going to be targeted by Google as a result of this? According to the WordPress site there have been about 100,000 downloads of version 1.5 and that means that a whole swath of legitimate users could get taken down by association if someone gets vindictive.
What the developer did was wrong, but no offense to Google, stop playing favorites here. Ban casinos and porn before you ban wordpress for spam because 90% of the spamming out there is done by gamblers and pornographers. This is such a small "victory" against spammers on Google that it's akin to marching a foot inside a country's sovereign territory and declaring victory over the enemy. Online casinos and pornographers do the most damage to Google so it's only appropriate for Google to go after them first.
Again, it's good of them to punish this developer, but let's be honest. In and of itself it won't be worth jack shit to stopping spammers or even slowing them down. If Google really wants to stop the problem, it needs to exclude any page with pornography, gambling and get rich schemes from its ranking system. Not saying it shouldn't index them, but when it scans the pages periodically, if it finds any comment or trackback spam on any blog or forum, it should disregard that page for the purpose of its ranking system.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
So, did they remove pages/sites that are running Wordpress, or did they remove pages from Wordpress.org? Cuz both seem to still come up in Google results just fine.
Speaking of google adwords spammers, eBay has got to be the worst. Every other search I do I get some generic and irrelevant eBay ad with an incomplete sentence containing one of my keywords.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
It's flexible, and I like it. You might too.
http//injoke.org -- Culling The Interesting
The current issue of 2600 had a letter suggesting people do exactly what Wordpress was now caught doing. Funny thing is, the letter writer was given a dismissive response, because everyone thought it wouldn't work (at least not for long.)
I find this quite worrying actually... it shows that google actually has the ability to more or less exclude a website from the mass internet. For instance if they excluded CNN from google searches, then CNN's traffic would doubleless go down.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
It seems unfortunate that an open-source organization is getting caught doing something possible shady. It is really unfortunate because there are people out there that will hold F/OSS projects to a higher standard.
I have never used Wordpress and so do really know much first hand about it as a program. But it does seem to fill a certain niche in the blog software arena. For myself, I will continue to use Blosxom.
Reaction...
Go here: http://planet.wordpress.org/
Read. Maybe read it again if yer slow. Sounds like the guy was simply trying to raise a few bucks to support what is IMO one of the best blogging apps out there.
You mean like the Google SpamReport page? It exists.
They used to link to it at the bottom of some (random?) search result pages, but I haven't seen it posted publically in a while. Perhaps it didn't actually work as well as you or they hope it would.
...the more they yadda yadda yadda. Invent any new tech for transmitting useful info on the net and sooner or later someone finds a way to massage the system to their advantage. Fix it and they find a way around. Now if they were totally pro-active across the board at Google and shut this down completely no matter what the search terms, we'd be living in a perfect world but they can't and as good as they ever get, someone will get around it.
BTW, how long until Google becomes the Microsoft of search engines and a rebellion begins because we realize we've come to rely on them to the point that other avenues have withered away but at the same time they are far from perfect and perhaps in our view then possibly malignant?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Blogger is full of this shit, too.
Just keep hitting "Next Blog" and you'll find a ton of blogs set up for advertising, just like those.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
If Google would do this kind of thing much more often, it's results would stop becoming watered down. They should make their policy simple. Googlebomb google and stop getting linked from Google. After a few businesses get nailed and put out to pasture the rest will learn and their results will once more become relevant.
I believe it is important to note that no flaming should be directed against Matt (founder of Wordpress). Afterall, all this was done so that it would improve the Wordpress project. Here is a good response to all this. Spam is spam, but there is a new side to all this.
- Teja
I know I wouldn'd hire a manager who disclosed this stuff on Slashdot. Not that it's a trade secret or anything, but it shows a startling lack of discretion.
Damn, and I really like Wordpress. I'm using it and Thingamablog as my two main bloging tools. I wonder what kind fallout this means for Wordpress from its developer?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Seconded. Flexible, powerful anti-spam mechanism and very active community.
First they don't tell anybody about it. Then they stop people from talking about it.
Stuff like this is just sleazy, and calls into question the character of the devs and site admins. Either that, or it's just a really stupid, really immature move.
I wonder if they've realized they've just upset a lot of users, who are now wondering if they can trust the devs and the software they produce anymore. I wonder if they even care.
A couple of questions.. anyone have stats out there on which is the most popular OSS blog software? There don't seem to be many comparisons on the web. I've been considering trying some new software but I don't want to waste time with one that doesn't have a good community behind it.
Link: Nucleus Homepage
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
So spamming and trashing search engines is OK if you think it is a good cause?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
My best friend was diagnosed with canine mesothelioma early this January.
I hadn't heard of it before then, either.
I'm glad he's a dog instead of a human, because his odds are a lot better than what I'd get if I had it.
Ontopic part: Googling for more information was a real PITA due to the type of keyword spamming this article is talking about.
(That is, until I entered "canine mesothelioma" into Google. The first link in that search is the most definitive link I've found. It's from the UGA Veterinary School in Athens, GA where my buddy is getting his chemo, which is working fine, thank you.)
I was quite disgusted with all the dead-end links and lawyer-spam that I had to wade through. One can imagine having to deal with that crap while trying to get more medical info on behalf of a (human) friend.
What happened: Photomatt, the guy who pretty much calls the shots when it comes to WordPress, was paid by a company called Hot Nacho to put up 100,000+ "articles" at WordPress.org. The point of these articles is to help Hot Nacho game Google. Furthermore, WordPress.org used a CSS trick putting links to the articles at -9000pixels on the WordPress home page. This is called "cloaking" and is explicitly forbidden by Google.
Why this is bad: WordPress is an open source piece of software. It's okay for the people running it to try to make money off it, either by asking for donations or selling t-shirts or anything else they can think of (www.textdrive.com comes to mind), but to knowingly break Google's rules and to receive money from a company whose practices many would consider shady without any feedback from the WP community is just a damn shame. A lot of people don't care and think everyone is being too critical of WordPress. They think asking for "transparency" in an operation like WP is stupid. Well yes, and no.
A lot of people have given a lot of time to WP. Did they have any say in this? From what I've read, they didn't. So this is one person taking the ball and running with it...he didn't ask if it was a good idea, he didn't ask for alternative ideas, he just decided that he knew what was best for the community and WordPress. Well, he didn't. Take a look at Wikimedia. When they have a donation drive, you know exactly how much money they get and where it's going. You can find out about the drive in advance, and read about it afterwards. What about WordPress? Just 100k+ articles popping up without a word until after they are discovered...
WordPress has made quite a name for itself, and is a great example of open source software in action. But this incident is a blight on the community. People will see this, not know all the facts, and make their own interpretations and ideas. Some will distort this to help their own FUD..."Why contribute to projects who are just going to try and profit off your code in any way they can?" Matt sounds like a great guy, and seems to have the purest of intentions, but not much good can come of a decision like this. Everyone is watching right now, and it's mistakes like this that open source could really do without.
Wow, I'm surprised by this. I had noticed Google traffic to Wordpress-powered sites dropping off. Do people think Google has known this for a while and been slowly penalizing Wordpress sites in its listings?
chick-in-charge at Blue Blood
Built-for-adsense-sites have been becoming more and more popular over the past two years. It's refreshing to finally see google actively go after these sites:
built for adsense sites
This would be a non-issue if the Google search engine and Google Adsense program were not part of the same company. Or if the built-for-adsense website were not using Adsense. It's strange that someone would put so much work into creating these spammy sites then overlook something so obvious. You are putting your fate into the hands of Google, the judge and jury, when you rely on both Google as a search engine and Google as your ad network. I doubt wordpress would get noticed for spam if they were using another contextual ad network to monetize traffic or another form of online advertising.
Within 10 minutes of implementing such an approach, an article would be on slashdot telling people to go to all Microsoft pages and mark them as spam and withing 15 minutes all Microsoft pages would be considered spam by Goooooogle.
(that's the sound of a joke going over your head)
I'm a wordpress user. I didn't see any "Wordpress needs your help, and $5!" text on the site lately. Maybe I missed it? I haven't donated to wordpress because there are a thousand open source projects out there and it's not so easy to decide where to send your hard earned, free software supporting cash. But if I saw wordpress was in trouble, it'd make that decision a lot easier. There's no way they exhausted all other options before dipping into the Google-TOS-defying low they've reached. Oh well. Live and learn. Nothing gold can stay.
www.kiwilyrics.com - a wiki for lyrics
As the title says I use the far superior (and faster!) pLOG blogging system. php/mysql, open source and a new version 1.0 just released (Officially on April 1st).
...I fecking hate the twats :rants: ...and the filters have been upgraded with better options to deal with comment spam. .. ...No F@$%ing comment :rants some more:
I've seen wordpress and checked it out and it's far to slow and very data base intensive. Not a very good system IMHO
You can check pLOG out at www.plogworld.net or see a working version 0.3.2 (about to be updated to v1.0) at my own place, blogireland.ie.
Thankfully in the new release they've added an image code verification for comments to kill those casino bots
I did hear that wordpress was having the same problem, so maybe googlit is being a little bit unfair
And there adsence program?
Smeggle
Succeed with AdSense
Hi,
I am curious about your sig. I've tried googling for it, but am unable to find the reference. Where is this quote from ?
MLT - simple and robust open source multimedia framework for Linux
I have an adwords account and just checked on the projected traffic for "mesothelioma". The results are as follows:
estimated clicks per day: 1.9
estimated average cost per click: $0.73
estimated cost per day: $1.73
estimated average position: 12.3
Again these are just estimates, through google, but who knows how much it costs to be #1 position.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
So if he had been selling crack to kids that would be ok, since he is funding an open source project?
Spamming isn't really the same as selling crack to kids (obviously), but unethical is unethical. No matter where the money is going to.
Oh, and to clarify/refute something several other people have stated - asbestos was an accepted insulator/fire retardant for a while, but then we realized that it was dangerous and banned it. Unfortunately some dirtbags, such as Grace, decided to continue making products laced with cancerous asbestos for years after the dangers were common knowledge.
I just get irked at the implication that companies are being retroactively attacked for products that we all thought were great - most of the people who are being sued were guilty of the worst forms of negligence, fully knowing the risks of their products.
Appears that an outfit calling itself "Business Barn LLC" has been trying this with high-ranking weblogs, too.
Also: here, and here.There is a LOT of money on the line here.
My response to the story was to go to the site and donate. Now I am writing something up suggesting some other more legitimate ways to raise cash. I use Wordpress and like it a lot, but I hadn't given a dime for software I would have paid a pretty penny for. Now that I have given them some cash, I won't feel like a total hypocrit when I suggest they clean up their fund raising.
Plastic Squid Harmless Toy
It's cut an pasted from above.
nothing like plagerisim to get modded up on slashdot.
There are lots of good spam-block plugins for WordPress. I basically receive *ZERO* spam comments or trackbacks that actually get through.
a /
Personally, I use Spam Karma:
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karm
But there are loads of other good plugins:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Spam_Tools
Don't complain about spam comments and trackbacks--get even and get rid of them!
So?
They're preventing discussion of a non-support issue in a support forum.
How is this not reasonable?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
this is sleazy - he should be up front and honest - open source needs to conform to a higher standard and not get caught in this kind of business dealings.
he should of put a note on his sight or in the license of the product.
I hope other developers don't try to pull this crap. I also hope distributions make sure this kind of crap doesn't go on in the software they are distributing.
If we want the world to use or software how can we get them to use it when slimey business deals go on like this - good intentions or not.
I don't want to recommend a distribution to my mom and have her computer used as a source of perpetual income for one developer. That is one of the reasons I choose to use open source - Might as well go back and get caught in the Microsoft upgrade cycle.
This was hashed out long ago, back when spam was mostly theoretical and only a few of us were trying to figure out what to do about what was clearly going to be a huge problem that we couldn't get anyone to pay attention to.
And subsequent events haven't changed anything.
It doesn't matter why you're spamming, you can't treat any reason or method as "acceptable", doing so will only redirect the floodgates and destroy whatever loophole you allowed.
And lo and behold, that's what happens, whenever someone shows even the slightest sympathy for the spammer.
Spam is spam is spam.
What on Earth does an outdent of 9000 pixels, and setting the overflow to "hidden" mean, EXCEPT that they are trying to hide it?
After all, very few of us browse the Web by reading the raw HTML and JavaScript. I find all the bad HTML code is really bad for my brain.
Asbestos dust may eventually cause mesothelioma. Plenty of people in body shops during the 50's-70's used to bang this stuff around all the time and are still alive without mesothelioma.
Plenty of people who have played with it *once* and are on their last legs too. Beh...damn crap and more crap. Asbestos is great stuff tho, they are starting to use it again in buildings because it is so good at what it does, just don't be stupid and smash it into dust...and you'll be fine.
I used to be an apprentice back when we had the transition from asbestos brake pads to semi-metalic, rule was always soak everything in water. Now all we've got to worry about is nano-particles from the semi-metalic pads...and some people are saying that's worse then the asbestos.
You can't win in any direction.
Om, nomnomnom...
By default, WordPress sends out update "pings" with posts (or a fresh install) to the Ping-O-Matic update service:
http://pingomatic.com/
I strongly suspect spammers continually scan Ping-O-Matic for new blogs and new posts. My blog is updated sporadically and I always notice an uptick in spam attempts right after I post.
Don't despair. WordPress has a lot of excellent anti-spam tools. I use Spam-Karma, but there are many others:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Spam_Tools
Add a good anti-spam plugin, and you shouldn't see any spam on your WordPress blog. It's really a great tool.
Back when unsolicited bulk email started, people said "that's not spam! Spam is only on usenet! We have to come up with a new word for this!"
I said then, and I say now, hogwash.
Any advertising by flooding a common communication channel can meaningfully be described as spam, whether it's Usenet, email, IM, Text messages, or search engine spamming. There's no point to trying to draw a magic circle around part of the problem and pointing outside and saying "that's not really spam".
The guy's making some good software (along with others) and he's giving it away freely (speech and beer). He just wanted to make some money. It's sad that now a lot of bad reputation is coming to him along with that money. I for one won't think of him badly. Quote:
/articles thing isn't something I want to do long term," he said, "but if it can help bootstrap something nice for the community, I'm willing to let it run for a little while."
The articles are given to him by Hot Nacho, a startup that pays freelance writers to generate 300-800 word articles about specific topics. All advertising revenues go directly to Hot Nacho, and he's paid a flat fee for hosting the articles and ad banners.
Matt said he was skeptical at first, but the money is helping to cover his costs and hire their first employee. "The
I just downloaded WordPress last night - to replace my homespun blog software I wrote back in 2001 (for my blog that I started all the way back in 1996 - it was just me writing HTML for everything). I guess I'll be sticking with my code for a bit longer now, until I find a suitale replacement. I surely dont want to support a company that does this...
Perhaps I'll be even rewriting my software, since I cant find anything that I like.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Google should fix THEIR problem. If someone can do this type of thing google should find a way to block it. Blacklisting or banning is a poor band-aid.
So giving away software doesn't generate profits all by itself? I'm shocked!
All joking aside though, I have to wonder how much more of this we may see. There has to be a pretty great temptation by some of these sites to take advantage of their popularity. Nothing wrong with that but some of them, I'm sure, will choose something underhanded like this. This is especially bad for an open source project because it not only damages their rep, but it damages the open source community as a whole.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
It's called stealing.
I supposed you rob banks, and say it's for starving orphans?
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Nuclear Weapons Products
Find it on eBay! Free registration.
Nuclear Weapons & much more (aff)
eBay.com
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
When they themselves own Wordpress' direct competitor.
Lately, Google seems to be adopting an "if you're threatened, crush the competition"...very far indeed from the quirky fun-loving corporate world they like to show to the public.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
If they really care about OSS they can give their code to a more reputable group. But they are history, and deservedly so.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Wow.
As a Word Press user I must say that looks impressive.
It actually has currently available features that I want and that Word Press developers seem to not care about, like multiple blogs.
Matt the Word Press King is an idiot. I don't care what the justification is, there is no excuse for spam.
From Google's own site:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
"Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users."
(scroll down to "Quality Guidelines - Basic principles")
Different content for the search crawlers is a SEO trick that is looked down upon by Google. I've seen this in practice and it really irritates me.
Andrew
I think the GP's point is that SPAM in all-capitals is a registered trademark of Hormel Inc. The flood of garbage interfering with communication is spam (or Spam if it's starting a sentence).
Hormel have always taken a very sensible approach to this issue, requesting only that people do not use the all capitals version, unless referring to the spicy ham product. Compare that to the way some other corporations think they can literally own words. I think we should give kudos to Hormel and respect their request.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
I'm a fan of Drupal myself; I moved to this platform from WordPress after becoming dissatisfied with WordPress's software (as opposed to payback for spammy transgressions).
Notice that my blog address is in my username profile and it matches my link. I posted as AC cause i couldnt remember my password, then i remembered, and reposted my comment so i would get my user + 1. You can look my up nick up on metafilter, fark , and fazed if your really that bored.
--
What is the sound of this sentence?
remove all links to them from your blog. I know I did. I realise this was all the work of one person and that many contribute to the wordpress project. However considering the spam code hidden in their main page I think it is not good to link to them for the moment. You can edit the wordpress files yourself or download the edited files from my site (click my sig link and see the latest posting which has a link to a zip).
Or click this link to download the zip with the required files. Upload over your original files and remember to back things up.
Removing bogus catalogs from the search results is harder. For now, I use Yahoo! search, which isn't as clogged with zero value catalog pages as Google.
They're on a mission from God!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
if this guy's story is any evidence, they should be able to get themselves unbanned by cleaning up the offending pages...
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
It'd be more accurate to call them "Search Engine Spammers", because that's exactly what they do.
Is it even possible of defy Google's TOS when you don't agree to it before they index you?
Personally, I don't care about the fact that Matt wants to make money from the work he did for wordpress. I'm more concerned over the fact that he's engaging in something that I wouldn't do myself -- that is, stacking his site with keywords that pay disproportionately more than other adsense keywords.
I'm willing to look past what Matt does because he's essentially allowing another service (Hot Nacho) usurp his pagerank and I have a feeling he's going to drop Hot Nacho, but I'm having a harder time forgiving people like Chris Pirillo who promotes nonsense such as this guy's scheme to get more money from adsense. It sounds too much like the get rich quick real estate schemes of the late night infomercials. Everyone, please! If you use adsense then live by the adage, if it sounds too good to be true, then most likely it is. Don't ruin it for the rest of us by doing this grey area shit. We all will lose out! Sure the tricks may work in your favor in the here and now (like a pyramid scheme), but at who's cost in the long run? Sites who put up legit information about a certain adword will be sideswiped by sites who cheat. It's not fair. If google can't fix the cheats, they'll just yank it for everyone across the board.
Additionally, by tolerating behavior such as this, we're opening the door for other sites to steal legit material written by those who've poured too much research and time in each article. Play by the rules and everyone will be happy. If you're a leecher, hoarder, or just plain criminal, I wish you the worst case of hemorrhoids, dysentery, and cholera combined.
Linux at home
I see so many types of sites which request donations. Everything from software dev to girls panhandling in LiveJournal. People get up in arms if they find out that someone they donated to has any other source of income, but fundamentally the whole donations concept seems flawed to me in the way it tends to work online. (1) Person has thing they want to spend money on which has at least some vague possible value and they don't want to or can't cover it out of pocket or through a legit revenue stream. (2) Person asks for donations, probably not exactly disclosing their profit and loss statement the way an official nonprofit would have to. (3) People donate. (4) People find out that either the money was spent on something else or the beneficiary had some source of funds besides their donations. (5) People get pissed off at whatever person or org got the donations. (6) Some other person or org asks for donations and people go through the cycle all over again. I'm not going to pretend I've got the answer to end all questions on this one, but I know that the whole donations button thing kind of rubs me wrong because it seems to always lead to a flap like this one and it seems unfair to creative people who suck it up and just make something cool. That said, I doubt whatever donations Wordpress has received cover all the costs and certainly someone talented enough to make such kickass software could have made bank getting a second job using the time spent on that software. Then again, he probably could have just covered it. Messing up search engine results aside, I don't think the whole donations thing makes it make sense for people to freak out after the fact that they didn't know where the money for Wordpress was coming from. If one is concerned about whether something is 100% donation-funded or where the money really goes, then that needs to be researched before one clicks the donate button.
chick-in-charge at Blue Blood
Google can't dictate content except on its own sites (google, froogle, etc), and they certainly are not doing it here. However they are perfectly free to leave junk sites out of their index. Google exercising freedom over its own index is not censorship nor is it dictating the content of other's sites.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Good point. I had not thought of that.
chick-in-charge at Blue Blood
Lets say a click costs the advertiser $10. Say a 100 of us do this "search and click" thing once a day. Boom, that's costing the advertisers $1000/day each.
Come on, people! Get crackin'.
But grandparent post said they can be found, and grandpa is right. I found Snowy Whistler, a spam site advertising whistler-portal.com. Some quick Google searching fails to produce that site in the results. Maybe they have more luck with Yahoo, MSN.
I feel comfortable that Google is on the job, and the six spam sites that GP lists either don't or soon won't produce results in Google searches
Test signature: Brett Walker
...do it like everyone else: Free iPods!
"Play Outside on Sunny Days." - Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto
Now the two adwords mesothelioma and debt consolidation are going to get rocked by hundreds of thousands of slashdotters. From an earlier post, the mesothelioma adword give revenue of $40/click. Be responsible and don't hammer the ad; for on the other end are lawyers and they will certaintly take suit against Google if they see a huge spike in traffic and draw the connection.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
His point wasn't very good. It is common knowledge that anyone can robots.txt themselves out of the Google index if they want.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
this is going to get REAL interesting heh
$7.95/mo hosting, 2.4GB disk, 120GB
I think the GP's point is that SPAM in all-capitals is a registered trademark of Hormel Inc.
I don't think he would have included email spam if that was the case.
WordPress has made quite a name for itself, and is a great example of open source software in action. But this incident is a blight on the community. People will see this, not know all the facts, and make their own interpretations and ideas.
Yes, but even if you know all the facts, it becomes clear that just because a piece of software is open source it is still possible to completely fuck it up. Even if it's only one of the developers who makes a bad decision. How do you fork a piece of software away from bad perception? Maybe you have to fork away from the developer himself.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
- Tell you to write content that's actually interesting to humans. (Editors do this professionally, and pagerank originally attempted to do this by guessing that if people go to the effort to put links on their web pages then the targets are probably interesting to those people.)
- Make sure that your interesting content is presented in a way that robots can find it. (An FAQ that tells you to put your keywords in titles and META tags can do this, or an HTML editor tool can do it automagically, but some people do need to pay someone else to RTFM for them, and theoretically an SEO can make money doing it.)
- Lie to the robots so they guess that your customers' actually-uninteresting content is probably interesting, so the robots show the humans the boring SEO-assisted pages first instead of the actually interesting pages. This lying is the main business that effective SEOs really engage in. (Ineffective SEOs are in the business of lying to their customers about being effective SEOs, but they and their customers deserve each other and sort of by definition don't have a high enough pagerank to worry about.)
- "Sneaky attacks" are SEO lies.
- "A very closely monitored network of domains" is SEO lying too.
- Hijacking blog comment services is really annoying SEO lying.
- Robogenerating lots of pages with lots of popular search keywords, especially if you're building them into URL names, is SEO lying.
- Robogenerating them without actually storing them anywhere might be technically interesting SEO lying, though disk space is so cheap these days that it might not be necessary.
- Hijacking real pages using 302-Redirect attacks is technically interesting for about 15 minutes, but is really nasty spammer lying.
Googlebombing by using sneaky techniques to promote your "403 Weapons of Mass Destruction Not Found" and "Miserable Failure"->"whitehouse.gov" pages was technically similar to SEO lying - but it was clever and amusing metacontent, and deserved its 15 minutes of fame, and watching the sleazy Republicans reply in kind was amusing too, but it's Been Done Now.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Vigilante Paintball Gunning, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from these problems. Somebody who drives badly gets an ugly paint-splattered car, and the only problem is that the paint's mostly on the back of their car and not on the front.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My bad, you're right. Dethboy was not protecting Hormel's interests, merely being ignorant.
VCI see that the Hot Nacho site looks fairly corporate and uninformative, but its whois info is public and it has been registered for many years, yet it does not have links in. It seems like, if an SEO spamming co would be able to do anything, it would be able to get links in to its own site. So this company no one has ever heard of before which no one (total of approx one teensy site) has linked to before goes to Matt and offers him enough dough that it looks worthwhile to him to spam Google? I feel like there is a piece of the story missing. I want to know who owns Hot Nacho.
chick-in-charge at Blue Blood
This is similar to John Delorean doing a drug deal to keep his car company alive.
on wordpress.org view source and look for the following:
div style="text-indent: -9000px; overflow: hidden;
and in that div are the invisible spam links. The word press gang has to be pretty unsophisticated if they thought nobody would view source and catch this eventually. And they still have tyhe offending code on their main page.
In the meantime, there's a plugin that allows easy posting of Gallery image to a WP blog -- WP-Gallery:i ns/
http://geoffhutchison.net/blog/categories/wp-plug
There's also Gallery-RSS for keeping track of recent updates to your Gallery:a llery_rss-announce/
http://www.smartbrother.org/archives/2004/12/31/g
Since WordPress (and many other blog packages) have open source and open posting protocols to work with external software, spam bots don't typically use the actual comment form.
Indeed, this is one good way that anti-spam tools filter away spammers -- by checking if a personal actually filled out the form!
If you want to block WordPress spam, check out any of a *large* number of plugins. (I use SpamKarma, but YMMV.)
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Spam_Tools
C'mon, get a life!
If Google is going to try to shut down Blogger's competition, they have lost touch with reality. Does Google think that they are the only search engine? Using keywords to feed ads has been common practice since before anyone had heard of Google.
A large % of general internet traffic is robots! I wouldn't be surprised if 20% of all internet traffic was non-human--it would be foolish NOT to have keywords in place to attract new surfers. This is just reality. Do you think ebay would have an affliate program at all if this wasn't the case? Absolutely not. You simply use keywords and text to drive traffic to ads--that's been the practice since the beginning--and now even more so that meta tags are pointless--Google can't do a thing about that, and they never will.
I've been online long enough to see browers come and go--the same for search engines.
I won't be using Google any longer...
Hotbot.com DMOZ.com altavista.com
Am I the only one who noticed that Wordpress has not, as of this writing, actually been banned by Google?
You may have intended to write "Wordpress MAY BE Banned By Google" or "Wordpress TO BE Banned By Google?" But "Wordpress Banned By Google" as a headline is just plain wrong.
Fewer Junk-chars you say? Ok, how about this, FUCK YOU!?
The problem is that everyone by now knows how to influence Google's rankings. For example, just type "miserable failure" into the Google searchbar.
This works exactly the same way as what Wordpress has done.
Nah, the "net donations model" isn't flawed, it's hopelessly hippy hoppy fluffy bunny naive. Anyone with sense knows that it takes money to live, therefore people with sense don't work for free. If some smart-but-naive person wants to give away free software, I'll take it and laugh at his plea for "donations". On the other hand, if he has the guts to state a reasonable price, I pay it. I respect people who make useful software and know its value; I have nothing but amused contempt for people who do not value their own work enough to state a price. And I give them exactly what they ask for--nothing.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Good thing it's Open Source and open to a fork.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Interestingly, Wordpress also evolved out of the original b2 codebase.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
This is *not* Google's internet. What people do on their own webpage is their own damn business. Who gives a flying flip if it's "against Google's rules"? I believe the site is hosted in the United States, and last I checked, in most of those states, the 1st Amendment still applies.
How is what was done any worse than a googlebombing, or any other "abuse" of Google's indexing criteria? This technique is not new. This technique IS NOT the same or similar to e-mail spam. Perhaps Google needs to work on its ranking criteria. Like most tech companies, when they were small they embraced the hackers, now that they're big they and their fanboys seem to be about to begin attacking them.
Matt has spent more time working on the Wordpress project than most of these whiners spend masturbating, which is a lot. It's sad that his work and recognition has made him a target of these leeches.
A mistake in judgement, among many months of doing things right, was made. It was nothing more than a P.R. error. I wish people would just grow up and deal with it. Threatening to boycott a free product is just stupid.
It's called CAPTCHA.
I'd like to add that finer control could be made with, say, a moderator system with a karma rating to weed out the SEDO's
Linux at home
Not a perfect method, by any means, but it does look as if it'll bias the sort to show the pages that people actually want to see. Combined with their other ranking methods, maybe it would help to improve their ordering? Or has this been tried?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
OK, so we link to wordpress.org by default. I just changed the link to wordpress.org.remove-me-they-google-bomb. I like the credit and helping others find good software, but I disapprove of the "fund raising" practice. Problem solved. I may put the correct link back once they stop the google bombing.
To others who want to do the same, there are two links in the index.php file (one in the right side menu, and the other in the bottom timer section), and another one in wp-comments-popup.php (again, the bottom timer).
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
You would not be doing that for laughs if you had an Adwords account. Jackasses clicking on your legiitimate links are the threat to the entire model. Does it matter if your bilking a rich lawyer out of $40 or a poor retailer out of 35 cents? No, it's still unethical and wrong.
It's a fine line, but there is a difference between SEO and search engine spamming.
Writing Googlebot-friendly pages, minimizing Flash use, using proper titles and headers, etc are legitimate techniques for increasing your Google juice.
Linkfarms, on the other hand, are not.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
is a pile of smelly first time php coder garbage. Yes, it worked, but try doing something useful with it other than pushing elephant talk.
So use one of those things that tells you to type in the word in the box below, and it's all distorted with noise added to defeat character recognition algorithms
And blind people.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
I hear it has plenty of fiber.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Just exchange the links like pollution credits... hheheh
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I just found out this is an April fool's joke! ./ fell for it!
What's great is that everyone on
The guy who invented the Palm PDA is working on making 'lifelike' computer AI. His approach, if successful enough, will make CAPTCHA tests useless to keep 'bots' from ultimately wasting server resources with a multitude of automatic form submissions.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is my first post about this issue:
e =article&sid=3827
http://www.nukecops.com/postt42460.html
http://www.nukecops.com/modules.php?name=News&fil
Fransisco Burzi had mailed me about this phenomenon. He said that he had been try contacting Google to resolve the situation.
That's the job description of a "web site author".
So what then does an "SEO" do? As far as I can tell, exactly what this /. article is
about. Namely, spamming.
So let's call a spade a spade please.
I currently run a MovableType blog, a WordPress blog (two, actually: 1.2 and 1.5), and a TextPattern site. I've evalutated all of the options and TextPattern is the cleanest, best designed lightweight CMS of the bunch.
http://www.textpattern.com/
PhpNuke has been completely banned from google's search.
The donations model may not be all that effective in revenue terms (though it works for wikipedia), but it's certainly a good way of allowing those who can't afford the price to use the goods. And it's a much better way than making money by participating in undermining the search engines on which most of us depend for much of the usability of the web!
It's not about guts, so much as priorities. You are able to live with yours - but your scorn for generosity seems a bit sad, somehow.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
So let's review.
1. Hot Nacho are search engine spammers
2. Photomatt decided to take payoffs from them.
3. Photomatt decided to abuse all the trusting users of Wordpress to support this little project.
4. Photomatt pocketed the bribes and left all the users of Wordpress to deal with the fallout.
I can't believe anyone is defending this scumbag.
Hi Amelia, I own Hotnacho.com and this whole story has been exaggerated beyond belief. For anyone interested, I've posted my side of the story on my website: http://hotnacho.com/wordpress-fracas/ Sorry, it's a bit lengthy Regards, Chad
Thanks for responding. Much appreciated.
chick-in-charge at Blue Blood
...killed Steve McQueen.
- learn to swim.