Wordpress Banned by Google for Spamming 472
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."
One word... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Er... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Er... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Er... (Score:5, Informative)
There are rummours these are one of the highest paying keywords around.
Some people will make anything to have these ads on their pages - even use hidden text to try and catch the Google bot attention. This is the "spamming" in the article.
Re:Blogger.com (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Blogger.com (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Er... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fork the bastards (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:They were begging for it. (Score:2, Informative)
If You Don't Want To Support WordPress After This (Score:5, Informative)
It's flexible, and I like it. You might too.
Re:Blogger.com (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fork the bastards (Score:4, Informative)
Google Spam Report (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Next ban eBay! (Score:5, Informative)
Every time you do a search on google, add the following:
-amazon -google -search -ebay
You'd be amazed at how much cleaner the search becomes!
Bryan
Re:Wordpress spam (Score:3, Informative)
built-for-adsense-sites are being punished (Score:5, Informative)
built for adsense sites [google.com]
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.
WordPress can't think of another way to make $$$? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:If You Don't Want To Support WordPress After Th (Score:4, Informative)
Blogger removes 'spammy ones' (sample size=1) (Score:2, Informative)
But grandparent post said they can be found, and grandpa is right. I found Snowy Whistler [blogspot.com], 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
like this from view source (Score:3, Informative)
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.
We, the users should fix this (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Same Thing Had Happen to PHPNUKE.ORG! (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.nukecops.com/postt42460.html [nukecops.com]
http://www.nukecops.com/modules.php?name=News&fil
Fransisco Burzi had mailed me about this phenomenon. He said that he had been try contacting Google to resolve the situation.