K-Squared Ramblings

Wordpress SEO fallout

Well, Wordpress.org has its PageRank back (now that the junk articles are gone), and is once again the first search result for its own name. Matt, still on vacation, tracked down an Internet connection in Italy and posted a preliminary response to the “villagers with torches and pitchforks”. Waxy.org has also posted a follow-up, including a statement from Hot Nacho (who produced the articles).

Update: And here’s the official response.

Gaming search engines with Wordpress

It’s always something. Apparently WordPress.org has been dabbling in black-hat SEO, hosting thousands of keyword-based articles on their high–page-ranked site and placing hidden links to them on their home page. Way to go, guys. This makes the paranoia over remote images almost look reasonable. What’s next, putting ads in the next default template?

The free/open source software world is based primarily on trust. Based on comments I’ve read over the last couple of days, WordPress has lost a lot of it. They’ve even been (mostly) dropped from Google. A sensible precaution while things are sorted out, but it unfortunately means the first top-level listing on a Google search for “wordpress” is wordpress.com, which looks like a cybersquatter. Not exactly an improvement.

In a support thread Matt answered last week, he referred to it as an “experiment.” He’s on vacation right now, but someone has taken it upon themselves to remove the bogus articles from the site.

My thoughts: Read the rest of this entry »