WordPress Under Fire for Search-Engine Spamming
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While the WordPress blog-publishing tool is combatting comment spam, its Web site is accused of gaming search-engine results to generate revenue. Google and Yahoo respond by apparently dropping some WordPress pages from search results.
One of the most popular Weblog-publishing tools, WordPress, is stirring a controversy over search-engine gaming because it included thousands of articles related to popular search terms on its Web site while largely hiding them from site visitors. Bloggers and search-engine marketers are accusing the open-source WordPress project of spamming the major search engines, while at the same time being one of the advocates in an effort to combat comment spam in blog postings. The discovery emerged late Wednesday when the blog Waxy.org revealed that thousands of articles about such popular search terms as asbestos, mortgages and debt consolidation appear on sections of the WordPress.org site while being hidden from visitors to the sites home page.News of the search-engine gaming technique spread quickly on the Web. As of Wednesday evening, search results to WordPress.org pages with the articles began disappearing from Googles Web index. Yahoo Inc. followed suit Thursday, removing the WordPress.org pages from its index because of what a spokesman confirmed was "noncompliance to our content guidelines."
Search-engine ranking tricks are nothing new. Click here to read more about the shifts in search-optimization techniques.
Matthew Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress who oversees the Web site, was unavailable for comment on the controversy. According to his blog, he is on vacation. But in a support forum on WordPress.org, he previously acknowledged that the site was hosting articles and Google AdSense ads from a third party in exchange for a flat fee.
AdSense is the name of Googles program for syndicating ads to content partners. In the ad model, advertisers bid on keywords in an auction and pay based on the number of clicks on their sponsored listings.
"Im not sure if were going to continue it much longer, but were committed to this month at least," Mullenweg wrote in a posting dated March 24.
"It was basically an experiment. However, around the beginning of February, donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything."
Next Page: Is it fair to call the technique "spam"? 
As an online reporter for eWEEK.com, Matt Hicks covers the fast-changing developments in Internet technologies. His coverage includes the growing field of Web conferencing software and services. With eight years as a business and technology journalist, Matt has gained insight into the market strategies of IT vendors as well as the needs of enterprise IT managers. He joined Ziff Davis in 1999 as a staff writer for the former Strategies section of eWEEK, where he wrote in-depth features about corporate strategies for e-business and enterprise software. In 2002, he moved to the News department at the magazine as a senior writer specializing in coverage of database software and enterprise networking. Later that year Matt started a yearlong fellowship in Washington, DC, after being awarded an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship for Journalist. As a fellow, he spent nine months working on policy issues, including technology policy, in for a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He rejoined Ziff Davis in August 2003 as a reporter dedicated to online coverage for eWEEK.com. Along with Web conferencing, he follows search engines, Web browsers, speech technology and the Internet domain-naming system.
