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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."
"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
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.
Search for mesothelioma and then use Linky to open all links, including ad word links, in tabs. E-Z!
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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"
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.
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.
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
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'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
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.
- 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