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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."
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)
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.
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!
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
My father worked for a couple of decades for Grace in a processing plant in St. Thomas, ON., and of course in his mid-50s he developed, and passed away from, a quick spreading lung cancer caused by asbestos.
Of course the cause was the heavily laced vermiculite (I remember hopping in big bins full of the stuff when I was a kid. It was a really neat spongy stuff that looked really interesting) that Grace was processing at the St. Thomas plant, and they knew for many years that it was packed full of asbestos but decided that lawsuits due to death and injuries were less costly than cutting off the asbestos lined mine.
Anyways, a lot of executives at Grace should have gone to jail for gross negligence causing death, but of course they didn't. As it stands we never did sue Grace, as that sort of case is much less common here in Canada, but I'm sure my father wasn't the only victim.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?