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."

Comments

the problem with that solution

[jbellis]

you would shortly have SEDO (search engine de-optimizer) specialists who charge you to sic their botnets on your competition... no thanks.

Re:Google

[alatesystems]

The only problem is that it's hard to notice all but the most egregious offenders.

Except when it's posted on Ars Technica for all the geeks in the world, including Google employees, to see.

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.

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.

Next ban eBay!

[n1ywb]

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.

Re:Google

[OAB_X]

It wouldnt block them automatically, it only triggers a human review.

Re:Geez - what a kneejerk

[geoffspear]

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.

Re:They were begging for it.

[SweetAndSourJesus]

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.

So spamming for "good" is OK?

[AtariAmarok]

So spamming and trashing search engines is OK if you think it is a good cause?

Re:They were begging for it.

[PaxTech]

What right does Wordpress have to be listed in Google's results at all? Google is in the business of providing accurate search results, if someone's playing tricks to direct results to something less accurate, Google has the right to "fix" things.

After all, if every google search just led to a bunch of spam pages, Google itself would cease to be very useful.

Re:They were begging for it.

[geoffspear]

What right do you have to have a website that doesn't link to my site? I never agreed to any Terms of Service with you that say you can not link to me.

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.

Fine, don't read the article! Here's the scoop...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sure they try to hide it....

[greed]

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.

Dictate?

[AtariAmarok]

"Does Google now dictate the content of other people's webservers as a condition of their being indexed?"

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.

Lying to People by Lying to Robots by SEOs

[billstewart]

Google Pagerank's objective is to use robots to guess which pages will be interesting to humans, and present the interesting pages first and the boring ones later. There are three ways an SEO can help you with this:

• 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.