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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."
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
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.
The only problem i could see with that is zombie networks , a quick little worm and shazzzam a site like slashdot is blacklisted . easy way to get rid of your competitors
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
you would shortly have SEDO (search engine de-optimizer) specialists who charge you to sic their botnets on your competition... no thanks.
That has to be the most insightful thing I have EVER read in a slashdot comment. You should suggest it via the google suggest page. It sounds like a great idea to use the most awesome pattern matching machine(the human mind). I'm sure there are more than enough people like you and I that can tell just from the description it's a google-attacking spam page that would flag it.
In short, mod parent up.
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!
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
you do realize that Q1 and Q3 could be answered in less than 5 seconds by anyone with knowledge of how to properly query google.
running time for quicksort: second result has answer
powers of 2: first result has answer.
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What is the sound of this sentence?
Well, the other reason would be: Very high signal/noise ratio.
People dont search for a word like"mesothelioma" just for fun, so its very likely to get "useful" hits.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
It wouldnt block them automatically, it only triggers a human review.
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
Quite frankly, I don't care if a spammer is doing it to support his development of a blogging app, his crack habit, or a nearly-bankrupt orphanage.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
What right does google have to remove them when wordpress hasnt signed any agreement with google.
Google hasn't signed a contract with WordPress, either. It's their right to lay out ground rules and ban anyone who doesn't follow them.
Newsflash: Google can do what they want.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
So spamming and trashing search engines is OK if you think it is a good cause?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
After all, if every google search just led to a bunch of spam pages, Google itself would cease to be very useful.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Google doesn't owe them anything. They're indexing them for free, and they can stop indexing them whenever they want if they don't meet Google's criteria for indexing.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
It looks as if thus far, Wordpress has removed the articles, google has removed the results, as has Yahoo! ... they are still available on MSN at this time, only through cached copies such as this:
9 &lang=en-US&FORM=CVRE
http://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=163233019523
So?
They're preventing discussion of a non-support issue in a support forum.
How is this not reasonable?
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
The problem i was mostly seeing was the fact that it would require say 100k or 1000000 , as a single spam report from one person compared which has to be delt with is less likely to be taken as seriously as 1 million or so (that will teach me to shoot my mouth off without fully thinking my post through) so even if it is under human review we all know how the group mentality works , its how my great grandparent post got moded up and its how its going straight down to hell
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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.
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".
What part of "Flagged for human review" does everyone not understand?
When a Google employee looks through the flagged sites, removing the ones which are clearly SEO-spam they will see www.redhat.com and think, "Gee, I am not so sure that is a spam site" and not remove it. Very simple. In fact, a particularly vindictive human reviewer may in fact go to his or her superiors and say "Hey, this site was unfairly submitted for review and I don't think that many people would accidentally do that. Why don't you look through the logs and try to figure out who did this and so we can remove their site instead?"
Alternatively (and I'm sure just as difficult to implement) would be a voting system. Allow users to vote on which links had the information they searched for. And figure in a sites vote tally into its rating
There's nothing at all difficult to implement about this. It's just wide open to abuse and ironically enough, SEO-spamming, by its very nature. Something the original poster's well-thought-out scheme is not even though everyone is claiming it is.
Random and weird software I've written.
His motives aren't the problem. His methods were pretty crappy. I hope this doesn't damage the WP project itself, as it seems like a great piece of software which I was planning to use (and still am).
Google's job is to give the user the most relevant pages to a topic. A search for "viagra" should ideally bring up things like the webmd information for the drug and pfizer's site long before any "BUY CHEAP PERSCRIPTION V1AGR@ FROM Cherub J. Happenstance" pages.
Consequently, anything that you do to your web page specifically and solely for the purpose of increasing your search engine ranking without increasing the relevance of your page, while we can split hairs about whether it's a "sneaky trick" or not, it's pretty clear that it's a nontrivially scummy thing to do.
It'd be more accurate to call them "Search Engine Spammers", because that's exactly what they do.
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.
The difference being that Blogger's spam isn't created by the people that run Blogger.
The uproar is over the fact that the lead developer and site maintainer of Wordpress was responsible for hosting the spammy pages. Even the page for donations has the hidden links.
The stated reason for this is to cover his costs and hire a full-time developer, but this raises a lot of questions about the need to do so -- What exactly are those costs? And is it really worth hiring a full-timer if it has to be funded with spam?
It doesn't help his case that he's presently on vacation in Italy.
(I'm not trying to bash him personally -- just trying to clarify the issue for those that don't understand.)
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
- 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
That's a load of crap. What do you think the end result would be if every open source app decided to do the same? Quite frankly, its disgusting that a GPL'd project would go out and piss all over the very commons that it depends on for its success, especially after all of the blog community's efforts to combat just these sorts of abuses. To have one of our own aid the enemy is unforgivable. I am furious, and I will not be placated by whimpering about "Matt's a nice guy" or "He needed the money!"
Its very seldom that these things happen, but when they do, we have an obligation to object and call the guilty parties to account for their actions. While harsh, boycotting WordPress and forking the code is an option that's available. Or less harsh, but more amusing, lock Matt in a room with Richard Stallman for a week.
"It's Dot Com!"
By that logic, the e-mail spammer is innocent, it's the company that pays him who's responsible.
Bullshit, they're both responsible. The Wordpress guy is receiving a financial benefit for it from the company who hired him, so he's hardly innocent.
And I'm speaking as someone who likes Wordpress.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
Um... unfortunately, all ranking program depends on honesty on the end user in one way or another. Google's pagerank depends on the assumption that many people are honest (most search engine depends on everyone being honest). However, in this case the website DELIBERATELY tried to game Google's search engine for their own benefit.
/articles is essentially advertising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I'm not sure if we're going to continue it much longer, but we're committed to this month at least, it was basically an experiment. However around the beginning of Feburary donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything. The adsense on those pages is not ours and I have no idea what they get on it, we just get a flat fee. The money is used just like donations but more specifically it's been going to the business/trademark expenses so it's not entirely out of my pocket anymore."
http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=23657
or here's the key excerpt from it...
"The content in
Yes, Google don't own the internet. But they do OWN the search engine algorithm that we use. While I might not agree with Google's action, I do understand the reasoning. You will be mad too if someone deliberately tried to screw around with your creation.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
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"