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."
lawyers.
Two words - Asbestos lawsuits.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
Because asbestos exposure eventually causes mesothelioma, and lawyers are all about suing in asbestos cases lately. There might be other reasons, but that's the first one I thought of.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Lawyers make so much money in lawsuits that they are willing to pay the most for each click on ads with this word.
There are rummours these are one of the highest paying keywords around.
Some people will make anything to have these ads on their pages - even use hidden text to try and catch the Google bot attention. This is the "spamming" in the article.
It isn't blog spam. It spam hidden elsewhere on the wordpress site that's the problem. Read the article!
Spammers are paying the wordpress site to host bogus articles on the site. Since the blogs of people that use the wordpress software package link to the wordpress site, the wordpress site is ranked as an authoritative site. This lets the spammers get their rankings on Google boosted because wordpress links to them in the bogus spam articles.
It has NOTHING to do with what people are blogging about.
The issue here isn't what individuals are putting on their pages, it's that Wordpress put a bunch of invisible links on it's front page. Because Wordpress has a high Google rating, this boosted the Google rating for the links. Obviously that's in violation of Google's terms.
Asbestos was widely used as a building material (insulation, I think) before it was found to be carcinogenic. Nowadays there's a bunch of money to be made suing everybody from a diddle eyed joe to a damned if i know when you come down with cancer related to asbestos exposure.
Is this one case where forking isn't a bad thing?
How would forking help? If you read the article...
So it's not an issue of Joe Blogger's Wordpress software being used to spam Google (although most blogs are susceptible to this). It's an issue of Wordpress's creator using the Wordpress.org site to host "spam" articles.
Ok, i used the wrong word, I guess what I meant was site inclusion policy or something of the the sort. But they relied on google (their money came from using their high rank with google), and they did something that google has made it quite clear that they would drop them from their index for.
It's flexible, and I like it. You might too.
http//injoke.org -- Culling The Interesting
while this wasn't about blogging, Google owns blogger.com so I doubt that they woudl have any problem with them. I am curious however to see how google plans to make money with blogger, besides encouraging bloogers to put up advertising.
sorry 'bout the mess...
Indirectly, the Wordpress installs are being used to spam Google. Joe Blogger's site has pagerank. Joe Blogger has Wordpress installed. Wordpress installs, by default link to the Wordpress.org site. Joe blogger's site passes pagerank to Wordpress. Wordpress hosts spam.
http://virtuelvis.com/
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.
They removed the pages from wordpress.org/articles/
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
Clean up your google searches!
:)
Every time you do a search on google, add the following:
-amazon -google -search -ebay
You'd be amazed at how much cleaner the search becomes!
Bryan
I doubt that. You get comment spam 'cause your version of WordPress (1.2) is vulnerable to attack. They failed to take complete precaution against cross-site scripting and other methods of spamming.
What is your penile percentile?
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.
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
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).
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
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.
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
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.