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."
"Mesothelioma"? It's a cancer, I guess (or so Google says), but not one I've ever heard of. How did that get to be an expensive adsense word?
This flies in the face of science.
... googling something will turn up nothing. But it will do it in 0.073 seconds!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
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
I search google for mesothelioma about once a week (from various proxies) and click on an adwords ad just to screw some lawyer out of $40 (which is what a click on that keyword costs.)
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)
lawyers.
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!
I just ordered mesothelioma from a Greek diner!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
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.
They had a high google rank, and profited(/broke even?) on it by breaking google's terms of service.
Not too surprising that google did something about it.
Search for mesothelioma and then use Linky to open all links, including ad word links, in tabs. E-Z!
sulli
RTFJ.
I use wordpress on my blog.
And i get a loads of comment spam that use keywords similar to the spam words that the wordpress website was hosting.
I wonder if the wordpress website maintainer has aided the creation of spam bots to identify worpress users and post on thier sites using weaknesses of the default install.
--
What is the sound of this sentence?
you would shortly have SEDO (search engine de-optimizer) specialists who charge you to sic their botnets on your competition... no thanks.
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.
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
Interestingly, this was for a MANAGER position!
So do they ask management questions of programmers? Human resources questions for janitors?
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.
--
What is the sound of this sentence?
It's flexible, and I like it. You might too.
http//injoke.org -- Culling The Interesting
The current issue of 2600 had a letter suggesting people do exactly what Wordpress was now caught doing. Funny thing is, the letter writer was given a dismissive response, because everyone thought it wouldn't work (at least not for long.)
Reaction...
Go here: http://planet.wordpress.org/
Read. Maybe read it again if yer slow. Sounds like the guy was simply trying to raise a few bucks to support what is IMO one of the best blogging apps out there.
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.
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
If Google would do this kind of thing much more often, it's results would stop becoming watered down. They should make their policy simple. Googlebomb google and stop getting linked from Google. After a few businesses get nailed and put out to pasture the rest will learn and their results will once more become relevant.
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
Damn, and I really like Wordpress. I'm using it and Thingamablog as my two main bloging tools. I wonder what kind fallout this means for Wordpress from its developer?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
They removed the pages from wordpress.org/articles/
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
First they don't tell anybody about it. Then they stop people from talking about it.
Stuff like this is just sleazy, and calls into question the character of the devs and site admins. Either that, or it's just a really stupid, really immature move.
I wonder if they've realized they've just upset a lot of users, who are now wondering if they can trust the devs and the software they produce anymore. I wonder if they even care.
A couple of questions.. anyone have stats out there on which is the most popular OSS blog software? There don't seem to be many comparisons on the web. I've been considering trying some new software but I don't want to waste time with one that doesn't have a good community behind it.
Link: Nucleus Homepage
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
So spamming and trashing search engines is OK if you think it is a good cause?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
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?
Wow, I'm surprised by this. I had noticed Google traffic to Wordpress-powered sites dropping off. Do people think Google has known this for a while and been slowly penalizing Wordpress sites in its listings?
chick-in-charge at Blue Blood
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
So?
They're preventing discussion of a non-support issue in a support forum.
How is this not reasonable?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
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".
I just downloaded WordPress last night - to replace my homespun blog software I wrote back in 2001 (for my blog that I started all the way back in 1996 - it was just me writing HTML for everything). I guess I'll be sticking with my code for a bit longer now, until I find a suitale replacement. I surely dont want to support a company that does this...
Perhaps I'll be even rewriting my software, since I cant find anything that I like.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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).
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.
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
- 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
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
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"