Popular weblog publishing tool WordPress is getting pressed over search-engine gaming because the tool included thousands of articles tied to popular search terms on its website while they were hidden from visitors, according to a published report.
The WordPress search-engine gaming was discovered March 30 after a blog named Waxy.org disclosed that thousands of articles about search terms like asbestos, mortgages, and debt consolidation turned up on portions of the WordPress.org website while being hidden from site home page visitors, according to eWeek.
WordPress lead developer Matthew Mullenweg was on vacation when the search-engine gaming was discovered, the journal said, but an earlier comment he made in a WordPress support forum showed him acknowledging that the site hosted articles and Google AdSense ads from an unidentified third party for a flat fee.
In that posting, Mullenweg said he wasn’t sure if WordPress would continue the arrangement “much longer, but we’re committed to this month at least.” He also said the idea was just an experiment, but in early February WordPress donations went down as expenses rose, “so it seemed like a good way to cover everything.”
WordPress client blogs and blog networks have had trouble with spammers in the recent past. Last year, some blog groups including the sports-oriented Most Valuable Network were bedeviled by blog content spammers pushing gambling sites, with some of those spammers using contradictory-appearing biblical quotes in order to trick blog viewers into visiting those sites.
The news of the WordPress search-engine gaming spread rapidly in cyberspace, eWeek said, with search results to WordPress.org pages with the articles disappearing from the Google Web index and Yahoo following likewise the day after. Yahoo pulled the pages because of “noncompliance to our content guidelines,” an unnamed Yahoo spokesman told eWeek. Google didn’t say why they pulled the pages but company policies include barring techniques showing different content to Google crawlers than to Google visitors, eWeek said.
WordPress, an open-source blog publishing tool, supports “no follow,” an HTML tag that tells search engines to ignore hyperlinks in blog comment sections. Those hyperlinks are considered a favorite technique of search engine spammers, who use them to inflate higher search rankings for their sites.
"This is a big deal,” said SearchEngineWatch.com editor Danny Sullivan to eWeek, “given the fact that they're supposed to be combating search spam, and [instead] they are generating it.”
The news hit as WordPress had begun looking into the creation of a foundation to support and run the service. WordPress user Jonas Luster, who helps lead the foundation search, told eWeek that Mullenweg made a big mistake using the articles in question to generate WordPress revenue. "Matt was and is trying to do right by the community," he told the journal. "Has he chosen the right way? I'm not happy about it either. We're all entitled to make one or two mistakes."
