Wordpress attacked by Google
March 31, 2005
Wordpress, which offers one of the biggest blogging software platforms on the internet, has been penalised by Google for spamming its index with advertising.
Allegations of were raised while the WordPress creator and lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, was out of the country.
Examples of the technique involve hiding links on the Wordpress homepage, which then link to keyword articles within the site that traditionally generate strong advertising revenues via Google AdSense, as explained here.
The issue crept into the public eye within a post on the WordPress support forums about an articles section which also linked to the keyworded articles.
The advertising was named as set up by HotNacho, who allegedly paid a flat-fee for the rights to advertise using the WordPRess site.
Although Wordpress developer Jonas Luster has tried to defend the actions of the group, the announcement has generated a storm of criticism from WordPress supporters, who feel abused for their trust in helping develop - and donate - to the WordPress project.
Additionally, Google employee Matt Cutts criticised the practise, pointing out that Wordpress had clearly violated Google’s webmaster guidelines. The offending pages have since been observed disappearing from the Google search results.
The story has sent a shockwave through the internet community, not least because WordPress was a very public partner in Google’s “nofollow” campaign, which attempted to tackle blogs being used for “search engine spam” purposes.
It raises a whole range of questions, not least about business models that open source development projects can take. Last year Google also implemented a penalty on the website of open source forum software team phpbb, after they sold advertising on the basis of their link popularity as measured by “Google PageRank”.