is wordpress.org hosting search engine spam?
waxy thinks so and explains his point in this rather upsetting article: wordpress website search engine spam.
and i have to say i agree… sad that.
apparently matt mullenweg, the wordpress übernacho, is quietly hosting a rather dubious service by a company called hot nacho on the wordpress.org website. this consists of 168’000 articles containing cloaked links to websites selling asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages.
the trick is to host these at the wordpress.org website to try and take advantage of the excellent google standings that wordpress.org has thanx to all the wordpress blogs linking to their blogsoftware’s home by default.
matt mullenweg explained that this pays for his expenses to develop the software.
but in my opinion this is very uncool, and should, at the very least, be made in an open and transparent fashion.
i know i would have certainly not chosen wordpress had i known this.
i will immediately remove all the links to wordpress from my blog, especially in my admin, and i deeply regret the various generous donations i have made to this project. and to all the people i recommended to install this blog software i say: i am deeply sorry.
don’t get me wrong, the wordpress blog software is still excellent. but if it is financed by a practice that destroys the web, which search engine spam is clearly doing, it quite spoils things for me.
hmmm. i always thought matt had something fishy…
should i switch to textpattern?
Just becuase there is something fishy going on with WordPress.org, doesn’t mean we should abandon the software. It’s a nice OpenSource (even if there are non-open aspects to the site) package, and a lot of other great people adding to it.
stick around.
no, you are right, we should not abandon the software. in fact we should take it down and re-release a “clean” branch of it… just watch and see. multi-blog et al.
and we certainly not be all blase about this. this is a major betrayal of my trust and many other people feel the same way.
multi-blog, that’d be great!
gotta brush up on my php, first.
er, learn it, I guess.
anyway, here’s the MeFi thread on th’ subject.