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Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the there-be-scammers-everywhere dept.

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."

6 of 472 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Er... by TheFlyingGoat · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. Re:Er... by freitasm · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Blogger.com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Blogger.com by Raven15 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. If You Don't Want To Support WordPress After This by Mike626 · · Score: 5, Informative
    ...one option to check out is http://b2evolution.net. Open Sourced, PHP and MySQL based. I've been using it for three months.

    It's flexible, and I like it. You might too.

    --
    http//injoke.org -- Culling The Interesting
  6. Re:Next ban eBay! by Dalroth · · Score: 5, Informative

    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