WordPress Caught Spamming
Wow, this has the makings of a scandal all over it.
The long and short: Wordpress’s Matt Mullenweg has been caught as using his site to spam search engines, taking advantage of its high PageRank with AdSense baiting articles written by Hot Nacho.
The details: Because every WordPress blog links to WordPress by default (including my own), it has a huge PageRank of 8 out of 10. Hot Nacho pays freelancers to write short articles, and WordPress publishes them all here. The disclaimer at the bottom of the page reads:
Sponsored Articles on Credit, Health, Insurance, Home Business,
Home Buying and Web Hosting, Copyright © 2004-2005
The articles are completely useless, catering entirely to search engines, all with keywords that pay big bucks in AdSense. Waxy says there are almost 120,000 articles. Matt explains in this thread:
The content in /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.
So, technically, its not even classified as spam, but a complicated advertising campaign. Matt is just trying to make money to support an excellent bit of software, and at least he isn’t doing it by bundling adware. Still, its spam, and dishonest. Google realizes that, and is in the process of removing the whole shebang.
It’s already starting to hit the fan. Bloggers are digging deep. Dave from Geeklife found a Hot Nacho ad offering to pay $1200 for 400 short (500 word) articles. Andre Torrez found that the site is using cloaking on the Wordpress homepage, hiding this:
<div style="text-indent: -9000px; overflow: hidden;">
<p>Sponsored <a href="/articles/articles.xml">Articles</a> on
<a href="/articles/credit.htm">Credit</a>,
<a href="/articles/health-care.htm">Health</a>,
<a href="/articles/insurance.htm">Insurance</a>,
<a href="/articles/home-business.htm">Home Business</a>,
<a href="/articles/home-buying.htm">Home Buying</a> and
<a href="/articles/web-hosting.htm">Web Hosting</a>
</p>
</div>The -9000px indent makes it invisible to all but search spiders. Cloaking is a huge no-no for Google, and all reputable search engines. GoogleGuy points out in the comments that Hot Nacho is posting the same articles in multiple places, another no-no. David Jacobs says Wordpress users should change the powered by WordPress link to point to this article. Even Jason Kottke is talking about it. Yahoo’s Tim Mayer links to it. Oilman calls it “pretty freakin stupid”. Greg Yardley blames Google for not having the technology to catch this itself. Ian Landsman calls them “Lying, Cheating, Rotten, Bastards“. Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo says he’s “nofollow”ing all links to WordPress till the pages come down.
Others: SEO Roundtable, Lisa Jill, Jonas Luster (WordPress inc.’s first employee), hmm, Elliot Back, Chyetanya Kunte, Darren Rowse, Blogosphere News, Silicon Beat, Patrick Strang, Kingsley, Spamblogging.
You want irony? Its been reported recently by none other than the San Jose Mercury News that Matt is the number one “Matt” on Google because of all the WordPress blogs with a link to his site. Doesn’t seem quite as charming as it did a few days ago…
I really don’t blame the guy. He’s offer a wonderful service that currently has no ad-revenue model.
I hope google isn’t removing everyone who links to wordpress.com :-/
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I did something similar once and made over $12,000 in one month through Adsense. I got banned by Google and the party was over. The weird thing is that I was banned by Google, but Google still paid me the 12K.
Comment by randy moss rocks | September 8, 2005
[…] Inside Google has a roundup of opinions about the case and notes: […]
Pingback by Fast Targeted Traffic » Blog Archive » Wordpress and search spam | February 11, 2006
If its to help fund a great piece of free software that thousands of websites benefit from… Whats the big deal. I dont see it as spam, I know many people who make websites entirly based on adsense. Google makes money, the site owner makes money, and the advertisers are happy because people are going to thier site and probably purchasing thier product or service. Isnt this what advertising is all about? How many completely useless magazines are out there, that make money solely on advertising in the same manner?
Comment by Web Blog | April 29, 2006
its cool..
Comment by tavla | November 4, 2006
Question. Was he using encrypted java script? Also I dont believe wordpress will go underfire just because of him.
Comment by Little Money | January 7, 2007
A few questions from a blog idiot
How do you keep the spammers from eating you alive? i\’ve seen blogs with nothing but spam postings.
How do you keep some left wing extremist from posting racist or defamatory rhetoric? and if you cant stop them, what are you legally liabel when they do?
can viruses be posted to blogs?
Comment by Fundraiser | January 18, 2007
Basically, the more popular your blog is and the longer it has been in existence, the more spammers attack you with automated programs. This blog, for example, gets hit with thousands of spam comments every day. Despite that, I have exactly zero spam comments that sneak through, because I’ve come up with a decent system.
Logged in users have their comments appear immediately. Spammers can’t use it because (a) it messes with their spam bots and (b) I can delete their account.
Non-logged in users are subject to a number of rules. If you are commenting here for the first time, your comment has to be approved, and if it doesn’t, your comment will never see the light of day. Even if you have had a comment approved (and spammers rarely get past the first comment), if the comment includes links, it also has to be moderated.
Now, I used to moderate all the comments individually, but the number eventually got too high. I’d go away for the day, and come back to 3,000 comments in the moderation queue. Sometimes, there were so many comments, my browser couldn’t even load the page! I actually had to hack the blog software to be able to even get through the long list.
Now, all moderated comments go through Akismet, which pulls out the good, real comments, just like an email spam filter, and lets me delete the bad comments with a single click. I still have to moderate the good comments, so if Akismet screws up, it won’t ever be public on the blog. I also go through the spam comments once in a while, in order to make sure no good comments get lost, since I love comments.
As you can see, there’s a lot of hard work and thought that goes into the comments on this or any blog. There are great tools to make it easier, and you learn over time the best ones for the job.
As for extremists, I generally let people say what they want. If someone wants to be an idiot, be an idiot and look like an idiot. I haven’t had much of a problem, because I’ve seen that when you give people freedom and talk to them, they act a lot more like normal people.
Viruses could be posted to blogs, but only if someone screwed up. Like, if someone tried to post one in the comments, it wouldn’t work, because the system doesn’t let them. However, if I did something stupid and let them post one, well, that would be pretty stupid of me!
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | January 19, 2007
The irony is that you’re replying to a spam that Akismet missed. (It should now catch if you recheck that comment.) And on a post about a spam mistake I made almost two years ago now.
Comment by Matt | January 20, 2007
a good pagerank doesn’t mean that the page is good too…
Comment by meeero | April 4, 2007
Many thanks for the tip on Akismet. I hadn’t realised it was free to use. Did you see that it is now believed that 95% of all comments are spam
Comment by Lynne | May 15, 2007
I heard about this awhile back. It just goes to show you that even some of the big guys were doing this!
Ted
Comment by Ted | July 9, 2007